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Who Gets Heart Failure? Race Takes Back Seat to Diabetes and High Blood Pressure |
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From Ascribe Newsfeed: Diabetes and high blood pressure, two conditions rooted in genetics and environmental surroundings, play a much greater role than race alone in determining who is mostly likely to develop heart failure, according to the latest study from cardiologists at Johns Hopkins. Experts say that racial disparities have long been known to exist in who actually develops risk factors for the condition, with African Americans nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes and more than a third as likely to have high blood pressure than Caucasian Americans. In the study, researchers monitored nearly 7,000 men and women, age 45 to 84, of different ethnic backgrounds and with no existing symptoms of heart disease. African Americans developed heart failure at significantly higher rates (4.6 cases per 1,000 per year) than all other races, including Hispanics and Caucasians. "When all major factors are taken into account, the differences between races for heart failure largely evaporate in the absence of diabetes and hypertension among African Americans," says senior study investigator João Lima, M.D. "A lot of public health attention has already been paid to getting high blood pressure under control, so it may be just that this risk factor is under tighter control in some ethnic groups than in others," he says.
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