Female heart-attack patients are less likely to survive when treated by a male physician than a female physician.

  Daniel Jolley

Very interesting study covering 20 years of Floridian ED patient admissions for myocardial infarct, looking specifically at the influence of gender-discordance between patient and doctor.

The headline finding was that female heart-attack patients experienced lower survival when treated by a male physician than when by a female physician. Baseline mortality across all patients was 11.9%, with a 1.5% absolute survival decrease when compared to male patients treated by female physicians.

Although on the surface this absolute effect size could be misinterpreted as small, it represents a 12% relative risk difference – quite meaningful when we are considering mortality from the leading cause of death in the U.S.

Could the researchers suggest a reason?

The authors identified two interesting points:

1. Female patients treated in EDs with a higher percentage or a higher number of female physicians were more likely to survive. Although true of both care from a female or male physician, the beneficial survival effect of a greater female physician presence, was more marked when treated by a male doctor.
2. Female patients treated by male physicians were also more likely to survive when the male physician had previously seen more female patients (0.02% increased survival for each female patient seen in the last quarter!).

"These results suggest a reason why gender inequality in heart attack mortality persists: Most physicians are male, and male physicians appear to have trouble treating female patients." – Greenwood, 2018

  Daniel Jolley