Women may be more likely to survive a heart attack when a female doctor is attending to her in the emergency room.
While chest pain or discomfort is the most common symptom in both sexes, men and women sometimes experience different symptoms before a heart attack, and female doctors identify them faster, said Seth Carnahan, an associate professor at Washington University and one of three researchers of this study.
He, along with researchers from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and Harvard University, reviewed nearly 582,000 heart attack cases over 19 years, and found female patients had a higher survival rate when a female doctor treated them in the emergency room. Female patients are 0.7% more likely to die if treated by a male doctor instead of a female doctor, Carnahan said.
(Their sample covers the state of Florida, which makes up 10% of the U.S. population. Overall, 36,000 women cited in the study died of heart attacks.)
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Women tend to misdiagnose their own symptoms. The classic portrayal of a heart attack, at least in Hollywood, involves a man touching his chest before collapsing, but that’s not always the case — especially not for women, Carnahan told MarketWatch. Women patients and male doctors may not always be aware of this, he added
“Women are somewhat more likely than men to experience some of the other common symptoms, particularly shortness of breath, nausea/vomiting and back or jaw pain,” according to the American Heart Association.
When they do go to the emergency room, female patients may not believe they’re having a heart attack if they’re not suffering from the classic symptoms. “Female doctors may be more keen to remember and pay attention to the sex differences in symptoms,” Carnahan said.
Heart attack is a big killer. One out of four female deaths can be attributed to heart disease, the leading cause of death for women in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The majority of women (64%) who unexpectedly die from coronary heart disease — the buildup of plaque in the heart — had no previous symptoms, and only about half of women know heart disease is the primary cause of death among their sex.
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