Study Uncovers Bias Toward Men In Treating Heart Disease.

2001 APR 19 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Susan Hasty. staff medical writer - Once again, in a large prospective study of how primary-care physicians practice preventive medicine, a close association between obesity in women and heart disease was observed.

That obesity is a risk factor for heart disease is the old news. for both men and women. The new news is that women may be getting short shrift when it comes to how primary care physicians handle their preventive heart disease care.

Julia Hippisley-Cox and colleagues at Nottingham University. England, studied the differences in treatment for men and women in 18 practices in 18 primary care groups in the Trent region. The researchers collected records for 5,891 men and women over age 35 with a diagnosis of "ischemic heart disease or prescription for nitrates."

In addition to finding that women with this diagnosis were more likely to be obese (25% of the women vs. 20% of the men), it was what the researchers didn't find that intrigued them. The physicians in these practices were less likely to have recorded body mass index for women (79%) than men (82%, p=0.002); whether they smoked (85% women vs. 89% men, p[less than]0.0001); and their blood pressures (95% for women vs. 96% for men, p=0.04), Hippisley-Cox et al. reported.

And even though women with heart complications were more likely to be obese, have high blood pressures (60% of women vs. 52% of men, p[less than]0.0001), and raised serum cholesterol levels (77% of women vs. 67% of men, p[less than]0.0001), they were also less likely to be ...