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by Carolyn Thomas
When I returned home this week after covering the 46th Annual Canadian Cardiovascular Congress in Vancouver for my Heart Sisters blog readers, I felt both inspired - and terribly discouraged.
Why, for example, out of over 700 scientific papers presented at this conference, could I count on one hand those that had focused even remotely on women's heart disease?
The people I did interview during this conference who are actually working in this area merely confirmed the discouraging reality of women's well-documented lived experience with heart disease risk factors, diagnosis and treatments. One, for example, suggested a higher risk of cardiovascular disease for female hospital staff who work shifts. Another reported that women heart attack survivors under the age of 55 fared far worse than their male counterparts.
But do we need yet another study showing that, as one of my blog readers commented this morning: "Well, sucks to be female. Better luck next life!”
Many of us real live women patients who have actually survived deadly cardiac events despite being misdiagnosed - sometimes repeatedly - already know that women are generally under-diagnosed, under-treated, and have far poorer outcomes compared to male heart patients. We know this from traumatic personal experience. And emerging clinical research continues to confirm, over and over, what we already know.
Here's a perfect example: first-responders like paramedics are significantly less likely to provide standard levels of care to women who call 911 with cardiac symptoms compared to their male counterparts, according to a University of Pennsylvania study presented at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s 2009 conference.
Researchers found "significant differences in both aspirin and nitroglycerin therapy" offered to women vs men. In fact, this study showed that of the women transported to hospital by ambulance who were subsequently diagnosed with heart attack, not one had been given a simple aspirin by paramedics en route, as recommended treatment guidelines currently dictate.
But my question to these UPenn academics (and all other cardiac researchers) is this: so now that you've undertaken this research, presented your findings at conferences, maybe even been published in a medical journal (a considerable boost for your CV, no doubt), what real life changes have occurred as a direct and practical result of your study's alarming findings?
Did you try to initiate or even recommend immediate retraining of all ambulance paramedics in order to compel them to follow established clinical protocols for both their male and female patients? Or did your study end, as so many do, with just another recommendation for further studies at some point in the near or distant future?
What I care about now are practical real life solutions at the bedside.
Read the rest of this article at Heart Sisters.
