In an editorial in the December 2012 issue of Critical Care Nurse, Grif Alspach challenged acute and critical care nurses to recognize, identify, and mitigate gender bias in critical care.1  This challenge is a necessary and urgent call to action. To meet the challenge, we should know more about sex disparities in cardiac conditions. Sex variation related to the electrocardiogram (ECG) is both genetic and sex-steroid linked, and sex-related variations in anatomy and physiology exist beyond the reproductive system.2  The ECG challenge for this issue is to consider the sex-based disparities in the ECG and cardiac rhythms. Entire books are written on cardiac disease in women,3,4  so no claims of comprehensiveness are made in this short column. Rather, I provide a brief overview of the topic to stimulate critical thinking related to a more gender-based cardiac nursing practice.

Sex-based morphological differences in the ECG...

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