A new study published in PLOS One by scholars at the University of St. Andrews School of Medicine in Scotland has found women and men with the same medical condition often receive different treatment — even when that condition does not call for sex-based differences in care.
The authors reviewed 1,112 published studies and narrowed their analysis down to 38 prior clinical studies (26 of which were conducted in the United States) that directly compared the care given to male and female patients. Of those 38 studies, 33 reported a significant difference in the treatment given to men and women. Almost none of those studies included any guidelines recommending different treatment by sex.
Across the analyzed clinical trials, the authors observed a consistent trend: Women were less likely than men with similar clinical characteristics to receive invasive management, such as surgeries, organ transplants, or strong pain medications.
“For clinicians, the findings are a prompt to check whether treatment is being offered on clinical grounds rather than assumption,” said co-author Andrew O’Malley. “For example, one study found that when the teams deciding who receives advanced heart failure therapy functioned poorly, women were less likely to be selected. Other work shows doctors more often attribute women’s symptoms to anxiety and make more diagnostic errors with female patients, even when test results are positive.”
“While the direction of the findings was not a surprise, the consistency was,” added co-author Miriam Veenhuizen. “The same pattern appeared in cardiology, surgery, transplant medicine and emergency care, and it survived statistical adjustment in most studies. It’s not entirely clear why this is happening, but it is likely because women were under-represented in clinical trials until recent decades, so many guidelines rest on data from men.”