Gender and positional disparities between echocardiologists and operators in MitraClip heart teams in Japan
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Gender and positional disparities between echocardiologists and operators in MitraClip heart teams in Japan Akihisa Kataoka1 Received: 15 August 2020 / Revised: 27 August 2020 / Accepted: 3 September 2020 © Japanese Society of Echocardiography 2020
To the Editor: Structural heart disease (SHD) is a new field in cardiovascular medicine. Due to the advanced nature of treatments involved, such as trans-catheter therapy, it requires cardiovascular specialists to form a “Heart Team”, which consists of cardiologists, heart surgeons, and imaging specialists [1]. The heart teams for SHD have been officially developed in Japan since the start of transcatheter aortic valve replacement therapy. An SHD heart team should partner with echocardiologists to ensure proper patient selection and technical success of trans-catheter procedures [2]. Echocardiography is practised more often by women doctors, compared to other invasive subspecialties, in the US [3]. These observations also shed light on a greater gender balance in the SHD heart team [2]. I hypothesised that a similar gender disparity might exist in Japan. Therefore, I investigated all 58 MitraClip active institutes in Japan, by direct questioning or via posting a survey on their website, in July 2020. The gender and relative position (job title) of the main echocardiologist and the first operator in the SHD team were assessed. Differences between them were tested by the chi-square test using MedCalc software (version 12.7.1.0; MedCalc Software, Ostend, Belgium); p
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