Race and gender disparities in heart attack outcome persist

Reported by Susan Aldridge, PhD, medical journalist

Sex and race still affect the outcome of heart attack, despite a decade of initiatives to foster equality.
Heart attack care has improved across the board in recent years. But, as researchers in the US now show, there are still disparities regarding gender and race when it comes to care and mortality. They looked at nearly 600,000 patients receiving care for a heart attack between 1994 and 2002.

When it came to restoring blood flow to the heart using clotbusting drugs or angioplasty, they found that white men were more likely to be treated in this way and black women least. Black women also had an 11 per cent higher mortality than white men. But the differences in treatment and mortality between white men and white women were generally small.

The disparity seen here has persisted over time, which is troubling. It looks as if black women are, perhaps, being under-treated when it comes to heart attack. It could be that, for some reason, this group has less typical symptoms of heart attack which leads to treatment delays or missed diagnosis. Clearly, this matter is deserving of further research.

Source
New England Journal of Medicine 18th August 2005