Heart Attack, the Patient's and the Doctor's Gender

"We find that gender concordance increases a patient’s probability of surviving a [heart attack] and that the effect is driven by increased mortality when male physicians treat female patients."
Brad Greenwood



Greenwood et al. looked at records from emergency admissions for heart attacks in Florida from 1991 to 2010, at patients' age, gender, and the emergency room doctors' gender. Results from more than 580.000 patients reveal that "when patients shared the same gender as their doctor, they were more likely to survive". Survival chances also increased when the emergency department had a higher proportion of female doctors and when the male doctor had treated many female patients for heart attacks before (via).

Further analysis showed that men and women had similar chances of survival when they saw female doctors. But male doctors were linked to worse outcomes, particularly for women.
Female patients treated by male doctors were about 1.5 percentage points less likely to survive a heart attack than male patients in the care of female doctors. (...)
These results suggest a reason why gender inequality in heart attack mortality persists: most physicians are male, and male physicians appear to have trouble treating female patients. (via)

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