According to a British professor specializing in cardiology, a large percentage of women are misdiagnosed with heart disease, due to the most prominent reasons being sexism, which causes serious health problems and injuries to many women with heart attacks and sometimes death. .
Shan Harding, professor of cardiac pharmacology at the British National Heart and Lung Institute, wrote: Article in the British Guardian newspaperHeart disease continues to be chronically misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed in women.
Harding revealed “shocking numbers” on the matter, such as the deaths of some 8,200 women in England and Wales from heart problems between 2002 and 2013 resulting from misdiagnosis.
And women are 50% more likely to receive a false initial diagnosis. People initially misdiagnosed are known to have a 70% higher risk of death, according to the author.
In addition to being misdiagnosed, women are less likely to receive treatment quickly, less likely to get the best surgical treatment, and less likely to be discharged from the hospital with the optimal combination of drugs.
Once a patient is suspected of having a heart attack, treatment guidelines are usually established.However, this is not the case for women, doctors may not adhere to the guidelines, and women are sent home with pain relievers instead of the treatments available for heart disease.
The doctor revealed a study indicating that women are less likely to receive treatments to open blood vessels using catheters.
The article identified some of the reasons for this problem, the first of which is the more common belief that women do not suffer from heart disease like men, and therefore seeing a woman with a heart attack is “unexpected”.
Although heart disease rates are lower in younger women, “it’s not uncommon” and more than 30,000 women are hospitalized in the UK each year for heart attacks.
About 21% of women die from heart disease, which is close to the death rate of men from the same cause (24%).
The second common reason is that “women’s symptoms are strange and unpredictable,” but the truth is that there is a great deal of gender overlap in symptoms, such as malaise, sweating or dizziness, as is the case with classic chest pain symptoms. , which is the most common symptom in men and women, although women are more likely than men to have it on their back.
Shortness of breath and fatigue are also common, but women are more likely to experience shortness of breath, fatigue, or nausea when they reach the emergency room.
The doctor notes that the doctor’s sex (male) also affects the odds of sexism and points to the experience of 1.3 million people in Florida who were hospitalized for a heart attack.
The study showed that survival rates were two to three times higher for female patients treated by doctors than for those treated by men.
He points out that the patient’s gender plays an important role in this, and there is a possibility that behaving in a way perceived as feminine “degrades your rank in the eyes of the male doctor”, and there is a possibility that health will crisis. it will be seen as “exaggerated, imprecise or hysterical”.
Uncontrollable emotional exhaustion has long been associated with women and is classified as a disease of the body or mind, and the American doctor, Alison MacGregor, described how “women who suffer often have a hard time convincing the doctor that they should be cured “.
The doctor says what increases the size of the problem is that clinical cardiology is a male-dominated profession. The number of clinical cardiology professors in UK hospitals has remained stable at 10% and in the US over 50% of medical students are women, but this figure drops to just 4.5% for practicing cardiologists (who they use catheters to treat heart attacks)
Harding suggests using AI “data science” to analyze patient cases, thereby achieving gender equality.
“Data science, by analyzing large numbers of patients, provides us with new information and shows the potential of algorithms generated by artificial intelligence,” he says.
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