Women more likely to die of heart attack if doctor is male

TAMPA:Women suffering heart attacks in hospital emergency rooms in the United States are more likely to die if their doctor is a man than a woman, warned a study on Tuesday.

The study was based on more than 500,000 patients admitted to hospital emergency departments for acute myocardial infarction -- a medical term for heart attack -- in Florida between 1991 and 2010.

Researchers at Harvard University found a "stark" difference in survival according to whether the patient’s and doctor’s gender matched. Namely, when women were treated by female doctors, "there was a significant and positive effect" on survival, said the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Almost 12 percent of patients die when rushed for emergency treatment for a heart attack. Matching female doctors to female patients "reduced the probability of death by 5.4 percent, relative to this baseline," it said.

By another way of looking at the data, "female patients treated by male physicians were 1.52 percent less likely to survive than male patients treated by female physicians." Previous studies have shown that women are more likely than men to die of heart attacks.

But why? Some experts have suggested it may be because women’s symptoms are different than men’s, or that they tend to delay treatment more often than men. This study offers a new explanation for why gender inequality in heart attack mortality persists.