The unfortunate reality is that heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death for both men and women, yet many people at risk of developing potentially fatal heart conditions are unaware of their susceptibility. Tragically, as well, both women and their healthcare providers are slower to suspect heart disease in women than in men. When hesitation over diagnosing heart disease leads to adverse patient outcomes, and particularly when prescribed treatments show a gender bias that withholds medical interventions from women that are considered “standard of care” for men, there may be cause for concern about possible medical malpractice in heart disease. Each case will be different and must be evaluated on its own merits, which is why women’s health advocacy demands not only improved patient education and physician awareness, but also legal support for women who have been failed by a healthcare system that too often treats them as “second-class” citizens. Contact an experienced women’s health advocate at Erin Marshall Law to discuss your concerns by calling 505-218-9949 today.
Misdiagnosis of Heart Disease in Women
Generally speaking, most medical problems – like most problems of any kind – are easier to address if they are caught early. This is, more or less, the “stitch in time” principle with which many of us are familiar from childhood, and a number of standard health recommendations, such as regular screening for various types of cancer, are based on it – often to good effect.
Unfortunately, cardiovascular disease (CVD) in women tends to be under-diagnosed in its early stages, for two main reasons. Unpacking these reasons can make it easier to identify the challenges facing women’s health advocacy.
Reason #1: Women Underestimate Their Own Risk
Obviously there is a high degree of variation within the enormous category of “women.” At the population level, however, statistics show that women often do underestimate their individual risks for developing heart disease. This underestimation can make them slower to suspect heart problems when they first begin experiencing symptoms consistent with CVD – and, consequently, slower to to seek medical assessment for possible heart disease.
A 2020 “special report” from the American Heart Association (AHA) reveals that the percentage of women surveyed who indicated they were aware that heart disease was the leading cause of death for women declined in the years 2009-2019, from 65% of survey participants in 2009 to 44% in 2019. Additionally, when the survey introduced a question about survey participants’ individual blood pressures, in 2019, the survey results showed a strong negative correlation between high blood pressure and awareness of heart disease risk in individual study participants – that is to say, women who had high blood pressure were significantly less likely than their peers with “normal” blood pressure to indicate that they were aware heart disease was the leading cause of death among women.
Reason #2 Doctors Misdiagnose Heart Disease Symptoms in Women
Medical professionals may also be primed to underestimate the risks of heart disease in female patients. Perhaps more importantly, they are in many cases under-informed about sex-dependent differences in heart disease symptoms – leading to a high incidence of heart disease misdiagnosis, especially in the early stages of disease progression. A 2009 study published in the Journal of Women’s Health and available to the public through the National Library of Medicine (NLM) found that physicians asked to provide diagnoses for a series of patients based on video presentation of symptoms misdiagnosed 31.3% of heart conditions in middle-aged women as some form of mental disorder, compared with 15.6% of male patients.
The gender gap in the frequency of misdiagnosis suggests that doctors are regularly failing to recognize symptoms of heart disease in women – or, presented with such symptoms, doctors are attributing them to some other cause and diagnosing the patient with a different condition that they may or may not have, raising a further concern regarding the potential risks of inappropriately prescribed treatments. A women’s health advocate with Erin Marshall Law may be able to help you evaluate the implications of these risks for your situation.
Medical Malpractice in Heart Disease Cases
Not every misdiagnosis will lead to a malpractice case. Appropriate legal support may help you determine whether malpractice may have affected your own health outcomes, but overall some of the troubling signs that can indicate medical malpractice in heart disease, especially for female patients, include:
Failure To Order or Perform Noninvasive Diagnostic Tests
The appropriateness of specific tests will vary, depending on the symptoms with which a patient presents on examination. As a general rule, however, the standard of care will typically require that patients be assessed for common causes of the symptoms they report. Usually, special attention is paid to either confirming or ruling out:
- The most likely cause of symptoms, based on the physician’s observations during an in-office consultation
- The most dangerous, yet likely, cause of symptoms (very distant possibilities are not normally evaluated until more probable causes are ruled out, but common conditions that may be severe or life-threatening are often addressed early on so that they can be eliminated from consideration)
The 2023 preprint of a large-scale study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found a “staggering” gender gap between men and women in both diagnostic delay (how long it takes for diagnostic tests to be ordered and conducted) and, correspondingly, time-to diagnosis (the period between the first medical office visit and receiving a formal diagnosis), for all conditions included in the review, “even when comparing across a common set of relevant symptoms.”
Failure To Treat
Even beyond the diagnostic delays, women’s health advocacy faces hurdles in ensuring that female patients receive treatment commensurate with the standard of care for cardiac conditions. The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) reported in 2024 a number of disturbing findings that all indicated women hospitalized with heart attacks were less likely than men to receive timely, aggressive treatment – and that female heart attack patients suffered broadly worse outcomes than their male counterparts as a result of these failures to provide the standard of care for their heart conditions, even after diagnosis. These lapses, beginning with unnecessary delays in diagnosis and proceeding through the withholding of potentially life-saving medical interventions for diagnosed CVD, are where women’s health advocacy often points toward a need for increased legal support for female patients struggling to navigate complex healthcare systems.
Schedule a Consultation With a Women’s Health Champion
At Erin Marshall Law, we take women’s health advocacy seriously. Medical malpractice in heart disease cases is a serious and ongoing problem in women’s healthcare, and legal support is only one piece of the total solution for achieving meaningful systemic change. We are proud, however, to offer that legal support to New Mexico women who have been let down by their medical professionals. Reach out to our Albuquerque team by calling 505-218-9949 today to schedule a consultation.
