Women health – stand up and demand attention
Shockingly, when it comes to treatment and / or prevention of heart disease, women get neglected; this has been revealed by a new pan-India study. The study was conducted by the American College of Cardiology Foundation and published in International Journal of Cardiology.
The study conducted across 17 hospitals between 2011 and 2015 involving 31,796 women and 66,245 men shows:
- Women heart patients in India are less likely to get the right medication
- Women are more likely than men to suffer from hypertension and diabetes
- Women heart patients are younger – 48.9 years old compared to men who average 51.5 years
- Hypertension was found to be more in women (62% against 45.6% men)
- Women had more diabetes (39.4% as against 35% in men)
- High lipids (cholesterol, etc.) was also high (3.7% against 3.1% in men)
- Treatment-wise:
- only 38% women got aspirin as against 54.4% men
- beta-blockers (a heart / blood pressure medicine) was prescribed to 36.8% women compared to 47.8% men
‘Our findings have significant implications for future health policy regulations in the Indian government’s National Rural Health Mission program that has until recently, largely focused on prevention of communicable diseases and maternal and child welfare and education at primary healthcare delivery level,’ said the study, acknowledging that ‘gender disparity remains a challenge’.
Dr Prafulla Kerkar, one of the main authors of the study and head of cardiology at KEM Hospital, Parel, said: ‘Cardiovascular disease has been recognized as the biggest killer at the national level, but we need focused programmes and grants for heart disease -more so among women as our study shows.’
The reasons for gender disparities in cardiovascular diseases in India could be multifactorial, such as variation in culture, religion and social customs. ‘This could be related to greater importance of the society to men’s health such as a tendency to preferen tially spend resources on men’s health care who are usually the sole source of household income,’ said the study .
Dr Ganesh Kumar from Hiranandani Hospital, Powai, who was also part of the Pinnacle study, said: ‘The study opens a Pandora’s box about bias against women in heart care, but we need to understand that the medical fraternity doesn’t differentiate between patients on the basis of gender. A patient is a patient for us. But heart disease among women doesn’t follow the text book and it’s often not easy to diagnose,’ he said.
A doctor who didn’t want to be identified said women patients ignore medication advice, mainly because either they themselves or their family isn’t willing to spend. ‘There are families that hold meetings to decide if a woman should undergo a heart operation or not. The same family won’t think twice if the patient was a man.’
