Preventive CardiologyGender Disparities in Evidence-Based Statin Therapy in Patients With Cardiovascular Disease
Section snippets
Methods
Using the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) administrative data sources, we identified patients with CVD with primary care clinic visits in the VA health care system (130 facilities or their associated community-based outpatient clinics) from October 1, 2010, to September 30, 2011. Patients with CVD were those with a history of coronary heart disease or peripheral artery disease, including ischemic stroke. We identified patients as having coronary heart disease using International
Results
We excluded 10,941 (1.1%) patients with documented metastatic care or terminal illness from our initial cohort of 983,476 patients (Figure 1). Our final analyses included 972,532 patients with 13,371 women (1.4%) and 959,161 (98.6%) men. Table 1 lists a comparison of the baseline characteristics between female and male patients with CVD. Female patients with CVD were on average younger, less often White, had a lower prevalence of diabetes and hypertension, and a higher prevalence of peripheral
Discussion
In these analyses from a national cohort of patients with CVD in the VA health care system, we found that female patients were less likely than male patients to receive statin and high-intensity statins. We also found that there was substantial facility-level variation in both statin and especially, high-intensity statin use among female patients. Finally, although gender disparities in statin or high-intensity statin receipt were seen, both genders had a low proportion of patients receiving
Acknowledgment
The authors thank Mark Kuebeler, MS, for his programming effort on this manuscript.
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This work was also supported by the Houston Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development Center for Innovations grant (grant HFP 90-020). The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
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