CHICAGO (Reuters) - Men are two to three times more likely than women to get a life-saving heart device known as an implantable defibrillator, a study of U.S. Medicare patients showed on Tuesday.
Implantable defibrillators are pacemaker-like devices that can detect lethal heart rhythms and shock the heart back into proper rhythm, saving patients from sudden death.
"This is definitely bad news for women. There is no getting around that," said Lesley Curtis of Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The large study of elderly patients is in line with prior research that suggests women do not get the same standard of care as men.
The researchers said more study was needed to reveal the reasons behind these disparities.
"We have a lot more work to do in this area," Curtis said. "I really hope when we do this work we find it is not overt sexism."
Curtis and colleagues analyzed data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 1991 through 2005 on more than 136,000 patients 65 or older who were at high risk for sudden cardiac death.
Via Reuters
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