Women have no more complications than men when implanted with heart defibrillators, according to a large national study to see if there are gender differences in outcomes.

"That's good news for women," said Dr. John Day of the Utah Heart Clinical Arrhythmia Services at LDS Hospital, who is one of two national co-investigators for the study, which took place at more than 100 centers in the United States.

With cardiovascular disease in general, he said, women "don't seem to fare as well as men."

Women tend to be diagnosed with heart disease later than men and appear to be at greater risk of dying from it than men, possibly because by then they have more advanced disease. Other studies have shown that there are gender differences in treatments and their complications, particularly in angiography and stenting, Day said. But no one has looked specifically at gender and defibrillators before.

A defibrillator is a small, battery-powered device that's implanted under the skin near the collarbone, where its tiny computer monitors the heart for dangerous rhythms. Should one develop, it delivers a strong electrical shock to the heart to reestablish normal heart rhythm. First introduced in the 1980s, hundreds of thousands have been implanted worldwide and the number of patients receiving them has been increasing by about 25 percent a year, said Day.

"As with all cardiovascular treatments, women tend to be less likely to receive this therapy," although the reasons for that are "beyond the scope of this study."

If normal heart rhythm isn't established, the result can be sudden cardiac arrest, which kills more women each year than breast cancer, he said. Annually, up to 400,000 Americans die, at least half of them women. But women are under-represented when it comes to treatment.

The findings are being presented today at the annual conference of the Heart Rhythm Society in New Orleans.

The study was a small part of a larger effort designed to compare different designs of defibrillators, the one-lead version vs. the two-lead version. Gender differences, fairly well known in heart disease in general, have not been studied with defibrillators, Day said, so the researchers did a randomized study with 1,557 patients who were followed for a year to conclude that gender doesn't change the complication rates for use of an implantable defibrillator.

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