Women with stroke treated worse than men

EAST LANSING, Mich., Feb. 23 (UPI) -- Women are 30 percent less likely than men to get stroke care that limits brain damage, U.S. researchers have found.

Specifically, women are less likely to be treated with tissue plasminogen activator, known as tPA, a potent blood thinner used to dissolve the clots which cause most strokes.

The finding, the result of analyzing 18 studies involving a total of 2.3 million patients, was presented by Michigan State University, East Lansing, researcher Archit Bhatt at the International Stroke conference held in San Diego.

"More than 60 percent of all stroke deaths are in women, and the functional outcomes and quality of life following stroke are poorer in women than in men," Bhatt says in a statement.

Two separate studies -- conducted by Michigan State University researchers in East Lansing and scheduled to be published in a special April issue of the journal Stroke -- also suggest more negative stroke outcomes for women than for men.

In one study, women were found to be 14 percent less likely than men to receive defect-free stroke care when the use of several evidence-based treatments -- including timely use of clot-busting drugs, aspirin, blood thinners, cholesterol treatment, smoking cessation and leg blood clot prevention -- were examined in more than 380,000 men and women hospitalized with stroke.

In the other study, data from a Michigan stroke registry showed women who had an acute stroke experienced greater emergency room delays than men, and the delays were not attributable to obvious gender differences in age or symptom presentation.