Female heart attack patients treated by male doctors have a worse chance of survival than those treated by female doctors, a study suggests.
Previous studies based on data from Australia and Sweden have revealed that men and women experience different care if they have a heart attack, while UK research has shown women are more likely to be misdiagnosed.
Now researchers say the gender of the doctor might affect female patients’ chances of survival.
“We find that gender concordance increases a patient’s probability of surviving a [heart attack] and that the effect is driven by increased mortality when male physicians treat female patients,” said Dr Brad Greenwood, associate professor of information and decision sciences at the University of Minnesota.
Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Greenwood and colleagues describe how they looked at records from Florida of emergency department admissions for heart attacks between 1991 and 2010.
As well as looking at the patients’ age, gender, and whether they had other health problems, the team also looked at whether the patient died during their stay in hospital and whether the emergency room doctor primarily looking after them was a man or a woman.
The results from more than 580,000 patients reveals that overall, 11.9% of heart attack patients died while in hospital.
However, the team found that when patients shared the same gender as their doctor, they were more likely to survive, with the probability of death falling by just over 0.6 percentage points once factors including the patients’ age, other health problems, the physician, and hospital-specific differences were taken into account.
Further analysis showed that men and women had similar chances of survival when they saw female doctors. But male doctors were linked to worse outcomes, particularly for women.