The team pooled the data from five clinical trials in which participants received drugs to treat heart failure. In total, the trials included 11,642 patients, approximately 24 percent of whom were women.
The women tended to be older and more ethnically diverse than the men, and they had greater incidences of diabetes and high blood pressure, the researchers said. The women also tended to report more symptoms and to be hospitalized more often than men.
"In general, women and heart disease has not been well studied, and heart failure has been even more poorly studied," said Pam Douglas, chief of cardiovascular medicine at Duke, past president of the American College of Cardiology and senior member of the study team. "We didn't have good evidence for what the gender differences might be, because the numbers of women involved in trials have been so small.
"In our current study, we were able to obtain larger numbers by combining data from the five different trials," Douglas added. "Knowing more about the gender differences will help us make decisions about treatment, such as how aggressively to follow patients or which medication would be the most effective."
Among all of the patients in the combined study pool, 2,400 of them died, Frazier said. Of the patients with ischemic heart failure who died, 18.6 percent were women and 20.9 percent were men. Among patients with nonischemic heart failure who died, 18.2 percent were women and 21.9 percent were men.
"Our data demonstrated that women had better survival rates than men, and patients with nonischemic heart failure fared better than patients with ischemic heart failure," Frazier said.