Despite having no greater chance of developing problems after high-risk cardiovascular surgery, women are more likely than men to die from postoperative complications, a University of Michigan-led study suggests.
Investigators assessed more than 850,000 cases of Medicare beneficiaries who had high risk heart surgery — including heart bypass, aortic aneurysm repair, and mitral and aortic valve repair — between 2015 and 2020.
Men and women had a similar rate of complications after an operation, around 15%.
However, women died of those complications at a significantly higher rate: Surgical teams failed to rescue female patients 10.7% of the time, compared to 8.6% for male patients.
The results are published in JAMA Surgery.
Researchers found a similar pattern in the failure to rescue rate for each individual procedure.
The most common complications for men and women were kidney failure, pneumonia and lung failure.
The quality of a hospital where the procedure was performed did not affect the failure to rescue disparity between sexes.
In fact, women in the study were more likely to receive surgery at hospitals that, traditionally, take on a higher volume of high-risk surgeries.
