Race and Gender influence Heart attack care
Physicians were fighting to combat racial and gender disparities in the care and management of cardiovascular disorders over the last one or two decades, but despite these efforts, racial and gender disparities still occur in at least some aspects of the treatment of American patients hospitalized for heart attacks. These results come from a study by researchers at Emory University in collaboration with Yale University and other centers. These results are published in the recent issue of New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers have, found a consistent pattern of less intensive treatment offered to women and black heart-attack patients.
In a patient with heart attack, clearing blocked arteries and restoring blood flow as quickly as possible can be the difference between life and death. The study has shown that heart-attack care has improved over the past decade but it also found that disparities in the use of medications and diagnostic procedures remained consistent.
The team of investigators from Emory, Yale, and other U.S. institutions studied the records of 598,911 white and black patients treated for heart attacks between 1994 and 2002 at 658 hospitals participating in the National Registry of Myocardial Infarction, sponsored by the Genentech Corporation. They examined differences by sex and race in the use of reperfusion therapy (the use of a drug or invasive catheter procedure to open an artery blocked by a clot); coronary angiography (a diagnostic procedure used to identify blockages in the heart's circulation); aspirin; and beta-blocker therapy. In order to eliminate differences attributable to illness of the patients, they included only patients who were ideal candidates for therapy.
Although a number of studies have shown disparities in cardiovascular treatment, this study was unique in that the researchers were looking for changes in disparities over time. They were surprised to discover that differences by sex and race were essentially unchanged between 1994 and 2002 and there was no trend toward a lessening of the treatment gaps for women and blacks in recent years.
"Lower rates of treatment in patients who are clinically appropriate for treatment are troubling and raise obvious concerns about under-treatment," said Viola Vaccarino, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine (cardiology) at Emory University School of Medicine and associate professor of epidemiology at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health and leader of the multi-institutional study. "These differences in treatment are particularly concerning for use of reperfusion therapy and cardiac catheterization because race and sex differences in treatment were not explained by patient age, risk factors or other clinical characteristics that might differ between patients. Simply put, we could not determine the reasons for these differences."
The reasons for the persisting differences may reflect some unmeasured characteristics of the patients or of the healthcare system that have not changed over time, the authors report. The socioeconomic status of the patient may also play a role, perhaps leading to lower access to specialist care, or admission to centers of poorer quality.
Nanette K. Wenger, MD, professor of medicine (cardiology) at Emory University School of Medicine and a co-author, said the findings underscore the complexity of the issue. "Although race and sex differences in the use of drug therapy were attributable to other patient factors, race and sex differences in use of procedures persisted even after accounting for these factors, and the question is why. What is it about procedures that results in race and sex differences in treatment that we don't see with drugs? And while we have some hypotheses, the answer is really, we don't know," she said.
More information on this topic and many other exciting research occurring at Emory University can be found at the Emory University website.