United States: Recent research shows that while men and women have similar rates of complications after complex surgeries, women are more likely to die from those complications. This difference may be due to how doctors recognize and respond to problems in female patients.
Although it was thought that women had more complications after high-risk surgery, the new data suggests that this isn’t the whole story. It’s important for everyone to understand these differences so that patients can receive the best care possible!
According to an article in JAMA Surgery journal October 16th, the two sexes have almost equal ICRs. Nevertheless, the female patients experience a higher failure to rescue rates.
As reported by aboutlawsuits, in the medical field, “failure to rescue” means that patients develop complications which could easily be treated but they actually die from the complications. So, researchers suggest that enhancing the identification and the control of female patients’ complications that occurred after high-risk surgery can aid to reducing the gap of mortality difference between women and men.
More recently, a research team including Dr Wagner of the University of Michigan investigated a pool consisting of data from 863 000 Medicare recipients who underwent high-risk surgery from October 2015 to February 2020. Men and women of any age received high-risk vascular or cardiac surgery repair including AAAs, CABGs, AVRs, and MVRs or MV repairs, respectively.
There were 304 thousand female patients in the study, and it covered 35% of either sex. Female patient was approximately 75 years while male patient was approximately 73 years.
It was estimated that between 14-15% of women had one or more complications, slightly comparable to that of the male individuals. Patients experienced adverse untoward events such as myocardial infarction, acute renal failure, pulmonary embolism, pneumonia, surgical site infection and significant hemorrhage.
However, this study reveals that, in cases where those complications occurred, the doctors would be less likely to use the necessary means to save female patients as compared to male patients leading to more death among female patients.
The researchers found out that women had a 30-day mortality rate of 4.22 %, and men had 3.34%. Another phenomenon that women fell prey to more than the men were the failure to save, and this was confirmed at 10.7% and 8.6% respectively.
“In other words, the clinicians failed to cab Aggregate Data Data Coordinating Center protect the female complicated postoperative patients more than the male ones after the high-risk surgery.” Wagner’s team said.
Researchers said one possibility for the failure to save the rates that the diagnostic algorithms hospitals use to flag and treat complications are treated the same among men and women and this could lead to misdiagnosis or failure to diagnose and since women have different health markers and levels of normal and abnormal than men. For example, symptoms of the heart attack are often much different in the women than in men.
They have concluded that it is important for the doctors to almost recognize the biological differences in the disease between men and women and In this way can manage and respond to the complications differently based on sex so as to help reduce the risk of death to women.