More women than men hospitalized for asthma

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Women are significantly more
likely than men to go to the emergency department because of
asthma-related symptoms and to be admitted to the hospital, a
Canadian study shows.

It’s not that women have more severe asthma, the
researchers say. Rather, it seems that women perceive their
asthma symptoms as worse than men do. Sex bias on the part of
healthcare professionals may also factor in to the higher
admission rates for an asthma attack among women.

To investigate sex differences in hospital admission rates
for asthma, Dr. Akerke Baibergenova from McMaster University in
Hamilton, Ontario and colleagues reviewed the records of 31,490
asthmatics between 18 to 55 years of age who visited Ontario
emergency departments during a recent 1-year period.

Women not only made up the majority of all emergency visits
(62.2 percent), they also accounted for a greater percentage of
hospitalizations (7.4 percent versus 4.5 percent for men), the
researchers report in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma and
Immunology.

These differences could not be explained on the basis of
asthma rates or severity in men and women. Even women with low
asthma severity scores were still more likely to be
hospitalized than men with moderate scores, Baibergenova’s team
reports.

“Although more research on the mechanisms behind this
phenomenon is needed, educational interventions that focus on
female asthmatic patients may be an efficient way of decreasing
the number of hospitalizations and thus reducing the overall
financial burden of asthma on the health care system,” they
conclude.

SOURCE: Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, May 2006.