Wake-Up Call”: Women Face Higher Post-Surgery Mortality Than Men Due to Complication Recognition Delays


New research reveals that women are more likely than men to die from complications after high-risk heart surgeries due to delays in recognizing and treating issues like heart attacks, blood clots, and infections. This “failure to rescue” often results from systemic biases, outdated diagnostic criteria, and a lack of research focused on women’s heart health. Despite receiving care at high-quality hospitals, women’s mortality rates remain higher. Experts call for gender-specific surgical care to address these disparities.


A recent study highlights that women are more likely than men to die from complications after high-risk cardiovascular surgeries due to delays in recognizing and treating these issues. The study, published in *JAMA* on October 16, analyzed over 860,000 patient records from October 2015 to February 2020, covering procedures like aneurysm repairs, heart bypass surgeries, and heart-valve replacements. About 15% of patients experienced complications, yet nearly 11% of women died from these, compared to 8.6% of men. Researchers attribute this disparity to a “failure to rescue”—a delay in addressing complications such as heart attacks, blood clots, and infections in women.

Despite women being more likely to receive care at high-quality, high-volume teaching hospitals, their higher mortality rate remained consistent across facility types. The study’s authors and experts suggest that systemic biases in treatment, unconscious biases against recognizing women’s pain, and outdated diagnostic criteria based on male patients may contribute to these disparities. For example, heart attack indicators like elevated troponin levels are calibrated for men, who generally have higher baselines, leading to potential under-recognition in women.

Experts, including Dr. Brittany Zwischenberger, a cardiac surgeon at Duke Health, view this study as a critical prompt for health systems to develop gender-tailored surgical and postoperative protocols, aiming to close the gap in outcomes between men and women and improve care for all patients.

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