A study letter released in the Journal of the American Medical Association to coincide with the annual meeting of the Society of General Internal Medicine, which took place from May 15–18 in Boston, says that women with chronic kidney disease (CKD) are not as well taken care of by their primary care doctors as men with the disease.
Jorge A. Rodriguez, M.D., from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and colleagues looked back at electronic health record data from adult patients with CKD who were getting primary care at 15 practices. They did this to see if there were differences between men and women in how they were managed according to guidelines and how new care processes were put in place. The group had 7,903 people, and 59.7% of them were women.
The experts found that women got worse care than men in most situations. The risk ratio for any lab test was lower for women (0.83), but there were no big changes when it came to cystatin C testing (1.1 vs. 1.6%). A renal-angiotensin-aldosterone system inhibitor or a sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitor was less likely to be given to women than to men (adjusted risks ratios, 0.80 and 0.41, respectively). Women were less likely than men to have their blood pressure under control (adjusted odds ratio, 0.82). The risk ratio for women seeing a nephrologist was 0.59, which means they were not as likely as men to do so.
