Gender bias: Stroke after heart surgery
Women undergoing heart surgery are more likely to die than men are. This trend is typically blamed on the fact that women with heart problems tend to be older and sicker than men with heart disease. However, a new study suggests that even after accounting for these differences, women are more likely than men are to die of stroke after heart surgery.
Among a sample of about 400,000 people in the United States who had heart surgery during 1996 and 1997, 5.7 percent of the women died within a month after surgery, but only 3.5 percent of the men did.