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Married men having heart attacks get to the hospital faster than single men
Medpage Today
Married men get to the hospital for heart attacks accompanied by chest pain quicker than single men, researchers found.
The odds of showing up at the hospital more than six hours after the onset of pain were a relative 65% lower in men who were married or in common-law relationships (OR 0.35, 95% CI 0.21 to 0.59), according to Clare Atzema, MD, of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto, and colleagues.
A similar association was not seen in married women (OR 1.36, P=0.55), the researchers reported online in CMAJ.
The finding may at least partly explain why married men have been shown to have a lower risk of both all-cause and cardiovascular death than single men.
“We surmise that, in general, women may be more likely than men to take the role of caregiver and to advise their spouses to seek early medical assessment,” the authors wrote.
Atzema and colleagues took a retrospective look at data from the follow-up phase of the Enhanced Feedback for Effective Cardiac Treatment (EFFECT) study. They performed chart reviews of 4,403 patients admitted to 96 acute care hospitals in Ontario over a one-year period for an acute MI with chest pain.
