Mario Gaudino, MD, PhD, first learned that women fare worse than men after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery as a medical student in Italy in the 1990s. Since then, the procedure’s outcomes have improved overall. But Gaudino, now a cardiothoracic surgeon in New York City, wanted to know whether women have accrued any of those benefits.
In a new study, he and colleagues retrospectively looked at the outcomes of almost 1.3 million people in the US who underwent the surgery from 2011 to 2020, about a quarter of whom were women. The data came from the Adult Cardiac Surgery Database of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, which captures 95% of heart surgeries in the US.