Women fare significantly worse than men after a heart attack perhaps because they are not treated as aggressively by doctors, suggests a recent article in the American Medical Association’s Archives of Internal Medicine.
In a study of 677 patients, the 34 percent of the patients who were women had more breathing problems and angina, or chest pain, because they were offered fewer diagnostic tests and were less likely to be told to take aspirin, concluded Dr. Lisa Schwartz of the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vt.
“We don’t have an answer as to why the women may be undertreated,” says Schwartz, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. “But there is an underutilization of aspirin in women,” she says, with 70 percent of men treated with aspirin and only 55 percent of women treated with aspirin after a heart attack. “Aspirin is such a simple and inexpensive way to treat (coronary disease) so every patient should ask his doctor why are they not taking aspirin.”
In the year following hospitalization for a heart attack, women have a “more rapid decline” in health than men who have chronic coronary artery disease, the study showed.
