No gender bias in health care, study shows

Women and men have similar health care experiences

Tessa Vanderhart, Staff

A new analysis of how gender and sex differences lead to differences in health and health care says that other factors are more important than sex.

The report says that the medical adage “women are sicker, men die quicker” could be more accurate as: “men die quicker, but women aren’t any sicker.” In fact, the health of both genders is actually quite similar when corrected for other variables.

According to Randy Fransoo, a research associate in community health sciences and co-investigator of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (MCHP) report, there is no evidence of “sex-bias” in health or health care.

Of the 12 diseases studied, two were equal between the genders: woman or man, you’re equally likely to suffer from respiratory disease or inflammatory bowel disease.

Women showed higher rates of hypertension, arthritis, hip fractures and infertility.

Men, on the other hand, have higher rates of heart disease and related heart attacks, as well as strokes. Diabetes was slightly more prevalent among men, as well as related lower-limb amputations. Renal failure was also more common among men.

In all cases, he noted that illness is not prescribed simply along gender lines — particularly when it comes to the links between hypotension (high blood pressure) and heart attacks, which are generally linked in individuals but not in the gender-based statistics.

“There’s still a lot of publications coming out saying that women get more bypasses than men, and that’s just not true: it’s young people that are getting more. It looks like a sex bias, but it isn’t,” he said

Although mental illness was not included in the report, a recent study by the MCHP indicated that women demonstrate significantly higher rates of it, and this may be related to the misconception that women are sick more often, according to Fransoo. He said that women visit doctors and hospitals more often than men. They have higher incidences of reporting illness and following through with physician instruction, which may mean that women may actually be healthier than men.

Fransoo noted that the differences in physician visits are largely related to pregnancy in females; but, once gynecological visits are taken out of consideration, women are still somewhat more likely to seek out medical care or follow up on it.

“We don’t know what’s right: maybe men aren’t seeing doctors enough, and maybe women are seeing them too often. We can tell what’s there, and that’s all,” said Fransoo.

He noted that the idea that men fail to see to see doctors often enough is becoming an “urban myth . . . . Even 20-25 year old males are on average going 2.5 times per year.”

By examining the data by area-level income, the study also accounts for socioeconomic differences; throughout Manitoba, and in Canada overall, women have lower incomes than men. The gradient of poverty and good health is not quite an inversely proportional relationship, but it’s clear that the two are linked, according to Fransoo. “In lower income areas, there is higher prevalence of pretty much all of the diseases,” he said.