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According to their definition -- which included deaths under age 75 from certain surgical procedures, bacterial infections, diabetes, certain cancers and heart disease -- preventable deaths account for 32 percent of deaths for women and only 23 percent of deaths for men.
Two of the items listed above are hospital-related. What's the female:male ratio of surgical intervention? I always thought that women were more likely to seek medical attention than men in the first place. If more women are seeking medical attention, more women will be having surgery, and more women will be dying from surgical complications. If you control for the number of people actually *having* surgery, are more women dying from complications than men, or are the mortality rates actually the same?
Heart disease is interesting, because I think women are still in the dark about how heart disease is actually the #1 killer of women in this country. I think most still believe its cancer. That's not lack of treatment, or lack of access to healthcare, its ignorance on the part of the patient population that yes indeed you do need to stop smoking, cut back on the hooch, eat well, and exercise or you will drop dead. Also, heart attack symptoms are very different for men than they are for women. Everyone knows the primary symptoms for men: chest pain, shortness of breath, pain or numbness in the left arm. For women? Symptoms are identical to a mild 'flu: fatigue, headache, nausea. Why would anyone go to the ER when they think they the just have a winter flu?
Does this study track patient compliance at all? I'm thinking of diabetes in particular. Are women more or less likely to be compliant with their treatment? When instructed to make dietary changes, are they less compliant than men? I have a sample set of exactly three to go by but anecdotally I can tell you that yes, the women in my family are 100% noncompliant with their prescribed regimen, while the men (man) is probably about 70% compliant.
There is so much granularity to look at here, I think throwing out a number like "Women die from preventable causes 10% more than men!" is an exercise in facile thinking and kind of irresponsible and meaningless without actually looking at the data (the site charges for access to the report itself.) It's like the "9 out of 10 women will have abortions" study, which if you actually looked at the numbers didn't say anything even close to that.
