Even though heart disease is the top killer of women and men, doctors are giving women short shrift when it come to preventive care, according to recent studies published.

Women are less likely to get drugs to lower their cholesterol, to get daily aspirin therapy to lower the risk of heart attack and stroke, or to be given the scans that can diagnose heart disease, researchers told a conference.

The reason is that doctors mistakenly believe that women have a much lower risk of heart disease than men do, said Dr. Lori Mosca, director of preventive cardiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

"These data suggest that if we educate physicians to more accurately assess risk in women, they will be more likely to receive appropriate preventive care," Mosca said in a statement.

Mosca and colleagues published two studies in the journal Circulation showing women failed to get optimal heart care.

One showed that two-thirds of women with dangerously high cholesterol levels and a high risk of heart attack and stroke were not getting drugs to lower their cholesterol.

Her team studied 8,353 women with diagnosed cardiovascular disease or who were otherwise at high risk because of diabetes or other conditions. They checked their cholesterol levels.

"We found only 7 percent of these high-risk women had optimal levels of all cholesterol measurements at the start of the study. This improved to 12 percent after three years, still far short of where we would like to see these high-risk women," Mosca said.

"We also found that only about one-third of women were receiving cholesterol-lowering medications, such as statin therapy, as recommended by national guidelines."

FICTIONAL PATIENT PROFILES

Mosca and another team surveyed 500 doctors, including cardiologists, gynecologists and primary care physicians.

They gave them fictional patient profiles and asked the doctors to make recommendations about managing blood pressure, cholesterol and other health aspects.

Even when a woman's heart disease risk was the same as a man's, the doctors tended to view a woman as being at a lower risk than men, the researchers told a conference called by the American Heart Association to highlight the studies.

"Lifestyle is the fundamental method to prevent heart disease," Mosca said.

"Therefore, it is vital that we continue to address barriers to help women stop smoking, get regular physical activity, eat heart healthy, and maintain a healthy weight."

A third study in Circulation found that women were less likely to undergo imaging methods such as stress single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and stress echocardiography, even though these methods work as well in women as in men to diagnose heart disease.

And a fourth found only 35 percent of procedures done to open clogged arteries, such as angioplasty and inserting metal coils called stents, were done in women.

"These interventions can save lives and prevent subsequent heart attacks in these women. Now is the time to translate our findings into real-world practice," said Dr. Alexandra Lansky, director of Clinical Services for Interventional Cardiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who led the study.