A large percentage of women are misdiagnosed with heart disease, due to the most important reasons being sexism, which results in serious health problems and the injury of many women with heart attacks and sometimes death, according to a British professor specializing in cardiology.
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 issue, such as the deaths of about 8,200 women in England and Wales from heart problems between 2002 and 2013 that resulted from the misdiagnosis.
And women are 50 percent more likely to receive a false initial diagnosis. It is known that people who are initially misdiagnosed have a 70 percent higher risk of death, according to the author.
In addition to a misdiagnosis, 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 medications.
Once a patient is suspected of having a heart attack, treatment guidelines are usually set. However, this is not the case for women, and doctors may not adhere to the guidelines and women are sent home with analgesics 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 most common belief that women do not get heart disease like men, and therefore seeing a woman with a heart attack is “unexpected”.
Although rates of heart disease are lower in younger women, it is “not uncommon” and more than 30,000 women are admitted to hospitals in the UK annually for heart attacks.
About 21 percent of women die of heart disease, which is close to the rate of death for men from the same cause (24 percent).
The second common reason is that “women’s symptoms are strange and unpredictable”, but the truth is that there is a large overlap between the sexes in symptoms, such as feeling sick, sweating or dizzy, as is the case with the classic symptoms of chest pain, which is the most common symptom in men and women. Although women are more likely than men to have it on their backs.
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 department.
The doctor notes that the doctor’s gender (male) also influences the odds of sexism, and points to the experience of 1.3 million people in Florida who have been hospitalized for a heart attack.
The trial showed that survival rates were two to three times higher for female patients treated by female doctors, compared to those treated by males.
She points out that the patient’s gender plays an important role in this, and there is a possibility that behaving in a way that is perceived as female “degrades your rank in the eyes of the male physician”, and there is a possibility that the health crisis will be seen as “exaggerated, inaccurate, 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 physician, Alison MacGregor, described how “women who suffer often find it difficult to convince the doctor that they should be treated.”
The doctor says that what increases the size of the problem is that clinical cardiology is a male-dominated profession. The numbers of female clinical cardiology professors in UK hospitals has remained steady at 10 percent, and in the US, more than 50 percent of medical students are women, but this figure drops to just 4.5 percent for practicing cardiologists ( who use catheters to treat heart attacks)
Harding suggests using AI “data science” to analyze patients’ cases, thus achieving gender parity.
“Data science, by analyzing large numbers of patients, gives us new insights and shows the potential of AI-generated algorithms,” she says.