Deans' stroke musings: Is There Gender Bias in Stroke Care?

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, March 6, 2017

Is There Gender Bias in Stroke Care?

What are the statistics at your hospital? Are they even measuring anything? So if your hospital measures nothing, you have a fucking incompetent hospital. Ask your hospital president if s/he had a stroke and came to their hospital, 'What are the chances of you fully recovering?'

“What's measured, improves.” So said management legend and author Peter F. Drucker

Is There Gender Bias in Stroke Care?

HealthDay News -- Male stroke patients are more than twice as likely as female patients to receive tissue plasminogen activator treatment within 30 minutes of hospital arrival, according to research presented at the annual American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference, held from February 22-24, 2016 in Houston, Texas.
Archit Bhatt, MD, MPH, a neurologist with the Providence Brain and Spine Institute in Portland, Ore., and colleagues evaluated 2695 stroke patients treated at one of 26 hospitals in the Pacific Northwest between 2009 and 2015. Only 3.9% had ultrafast door-to-needle times (<30 minutes).
Three factors appeared to make a difference in whether or not stroke patients received ultrafast treatment: sex, arrival method, and arrival day. Men were 2.2 times more likely than women to get ultrafast treatment; patients arriving by ambulance were 4.7 times more likely to get the fast treatment than stroke patients driven to the hospital; and weekday arrivals were nearly twice as likely as those arriving during the evening or weekends to get ultrafast treatment.
Regarding the gender disparity, "We could not find a reason for the disparity," Dr Bhatt told HealthDay. "At least, there was nothing measurable in the database."

Reference

Bhatt A, Lucas L, Baraban E. Male gender predicts ultrafast administration of intravenous tissue plasminogen activator in a twenty-six hospital network. Presented at: 2017 International Stroke Conference. February 22-24, 2017; Houston, TX. Poster TMP88.