The study focuses on the use of cholesterol lowering medications in 825 men and women with coronary artery disease at 16 academic medical centers in the United States and Canada. Twenty percent of those in the study were women. The researchers looked at the percentage of patients with high LDL levels who were offered cholesterol-lowering drugs from 1994 to 1997, and found that while the numbers improved slightly for men, treatment for women lagged far behind. By 1997, the percentage of men on medication had increased to 54 percent while the percentage among women dropped to 35 percent. These results provide evidence of considerable sex bias in the treatment of women with heart disease at major academic medical centers.
Heart disease is the number-one killer of both men and women.
Recent studies have demonstrated that heart attack rates can be reduced in both sexes with cholesterol-lowering medications known as statins. Other authors of the study include Drs. Robert Byington and Curt Furberg at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Dr. Don Hunninghake at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine and Dr. Bert Pitt at the University of Michigan Medical Center. The study was funded by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. The Archives of Internal Medicine has the highest readership of all the subspecialty journals published by the American Medical Association.