Women fare “much worse” than men and are two times more likely to have a stroke or die after having surgery on their heart’s aorta, according to a new study by local researchers.
The recently published paper says women are 80-per cent more likely to die after aortic arch surgery, 90-per cent more likely to experience a stroke, and 40-per cent more likely to experience a complication.
“There shouldn’t be an outcome gap between men and women,” said Dr. Jennifer Chung in a statement. Chung is the lead author on the paper, and both a cardiac surgeon and scientist at the University Health Network’s Peter Munk Cardiac Centre.
Dr. Michael Chu, a cardiac surgeon at London Health Sciences Centre, served as the paper’s senior investigator.
“We created a national registry database looking at 17,000 patients who had undergone aortic surgery at 10 institutions across the country,” he told 980 CFPL.
Chu said women tended to present later in the disease process, and were therefore older when they underwent surgery.
“This would suggest that if these women were operated on when aneurysms were smaller and earlier on in the disease process, they may have had a better outcome,” he said.
Chu said further research to understand why women and men experience different outcomes, and how the problem can be avoided, is needed.
“Our surgical techniques, we don’t really vary much between female and males,” he added. “We know that in some areas of cardiovascular medicine, newer technologies and newer techniques actually help to narrow that gap between men and women, so perhaps we need to be further exploring some of these newer techniques to see if it works in thoracic aortic disease.”
The paper, published in February’s sex-themed issue of Circulation, pulls data from cities across Canada, including Victoria, Laval, Toronto, Ottawa, Sudbury, Kingston, and Winnipeg.
“We shouldn’t accept that women are more ‘fragile,'” said Dr. Chung. “We should work to minimize that gap as much as possible.”