When surgeons find a secondary condition that needs fixing during heart surgery, they're more likely to correct it if the patient is a man That was true for two conditions: Atrial fibrillation and leaky tricuspid heart valves Surgeons might (erroneously) believe that female patients are frailer and skip the added procedure for that reason MONDAY, July 1, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- You're getting heart surgery, but your surgeon notices a new anomaly that perhaps could be fixed at the same time. That's more likely to happen if you're a man than a woman, new studies find. The findings came as little surprise to lead researcher , an integrated thoracic surgery resident at University of Michigan (UM) Health.
“Across the spectrum of cardiovascular care, from medical management to transcatheter and surgical procedures, there is growing evidence that women are under-treated,” she said in a UM news release. In one of the studies, Wagner's team focused on (a-fib), a common irregular heartbeat that can greatly raise a person's risk for stroke if it's not treated. Her team looked at about 5,000 people with a-fib who'd also undergone heart bypass or aortic valve replacement surgery at one of nearly three dozen Michigan hospitals between 2014 and 2022.
Even though cardiology guidelines recommend that a-fib be repaired during a cardiac surgery, this only happened 59% of the time for the female patients versus 67% of the time for males, the study found. Put another way, that means that wom.
