Women Receive Less Care For Same Conditions, Study Shows

Earlier this year, the government launched a renewed Women’s Health Strategy. This, they said, could help to address “outdated and misogynistic practices around pain relief” and “long-standing disparities” in care.

If a new paper is anything to go by, this is long overdue.

According to research from the University of St Andrew’s, which reviewed 38 studies, “men and women are frequently treated differently by healthcare systems”.

Their analysis found that 33 of the 38 studies, selected because they specifically compared the care of men and women in a health setting, showed significant treatment discrepancies.

This included a trend of women being offered less “active management” than men with the same conditions, including heart failure, Parkinson’s, liver failure, and kidney disease.

By issue, the analysis suggested:

Women with myocardial infarction, heart failure, or an irregular heartbeat were likelier to be offered medication, while men with the same conditions received more intensive treatment like coronary bypasses or stents.

Women were also more likely than men to be prescribed statins.

Women who needed to be on dialysis due to their kidney issues were less likely than men with the same needs to be given constant access and typically used a catheter for longer.

On average, women were less likely than men to be offered stronger pain medication, like opioids.

Men with Parkinson’s were referred for deep brain stimulation, which helps to control symptoms when drugs become less effective, more often than women with Parkinson’s.

However, women, who make up a majority of dementia cases, were more likely to be treated for the disease than men with the same issue.

Stroke treatment was about equal between genders.

Women in liver failure got fewer transplants than men.

Like stroke, patients with diabetes tended to receive equal treatment.

Dr Andrew O’Malley, who helped to lead this study, said: “For clinicians, the findings are a prompt to check whether treatment is being offered on clinical grounds rather than assumption.

“For example, one study found that when the teams deciding who receives advanced heart failure therapy functioned poorly, women were less likely to be selected. Other work shows doctors more often attribute women’s symptoms to anxiety and make more diagnostic errors with female patients, even when test results are positive.”

And Dr Miriam Veenhuizen, the paper’s corresponding author, added: “While the direction of the findings was not a surprise, the consistency was.

“The same pattern appeared in cardiology, surgery, transplant medicine and emergency care, and it survived statistical adjustment in most studies. It’s not entirely clear why this is happening, but it is likely because women were under-represented in clinical trials until recent decades, so many guidelines rest on data from men.”