Sexism leaves women with heart problems half as likely to get bypass

Researchers followed UK heart patients for a decade and found sharp disparities related to gender, race and affluence

Sexism in medicine means women with heart problems are around half as likely as men to receive bypass surgery, new research suggests.
A study of almost 300,000 patients with heart disease found sharp disparities in treatment and prompted warnings that “conscious and unconscious biases” must be tackled.
Researchers from Bristol University tracked patients admitted to hospitals in England for ischaemic heart disease and heart valve disease between 2010 and 2019.
The resulting study “lays bare the inequalities that persist in access to heart surgery, and the disproportionate impact this has on women”, independent experts said.
Published online in the journal Heart, it suggested women were 59 per cent less likely to have coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) – and 31 per cent less likely to have valve surgery – than men.
Black people were around a third less likely than white people to have such operations. The chance of surgery was also greater if patients were more affluent.
Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, a consultant cardiologist who is associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said the researchers had allowed for the fact that women tend to have heart attacks at a later stage in life than men – and the disparity remained.
She said:“This study lays bare the inequalities that persist in access to heart surgery, and the disproportionate impact this has on women, black people, and those from more socially deprived backgrounds.”
Dr Babu-Narayan added: “This research yet again points towards the long-standing inequalities facing patients throughout their medical journey. It should act as a rallying cry to the new Government as it sets out its plans for the NHS.”
She pointed to a lack of diversity among the medics dealing with heart patients, saying: “Women and people whose ethnic background is minority in the UK are massively underrepresented in cardiology and cardiac surgery, especially at a senior level.” 
The study comes after it was reported that two women a day are dying needlessly because of a “heart attack gender gap”, in which they do not receive equal treatment to men.
Cardiologists said female patients were suffering a “shocking injustice” because medics too often thought of heart disease as a male problem.
Studies found that women were 50 per cent more likely than men to receive a wrong initial diagnosis when they were having a heart attack, increasing their risk of death.
The new study, also found that women, black people and the less affluent who did get the treatments were also more likely to die within a year of undergoing surgery.
Dominique Vervoort, of the University of Toronto, said the study showed “potential gaps in access to care” and called for action to tackle “conscious and unconscious biases” against groups.
“Identifying inequalities and inequities in access to cardiac surgical care is essential for health systems to understand which patients might be left behind,” she wrote in the journal.
Researchers said the disparities linked to demographic and socioeconomic characteristics needed to be tackled urgently.