Black Heart Patients Face Higher Death Rates, Less Early Treatment

Similarly, only 44.6 percent of Blacks underwent an angioplasty with a stent, more formally known as a percutaneous coronary intervention, or PCI, compared with 58.1 percent of whites.

"Put simply, people of color receive less [health] care — and often worse care — than white Americans,” Austin Frakt, director of the Partnered Evidence-Based Policy Resource Center in the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System and a senior research scientist in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who was not part of this study, wrote earlier this year in a blog post for The New York Times. “African American patients tend to receive lower-quality health services, including for cancer, HIV, prenatal care and preventive care, vast research shows. They are also less likely to receive treatment for cardiovascular disease, and they are more likely to have unnecessary limb amputations."

In 2017 non-Hispanic Black patients had higher death rates from cardiovascular diseases than non-Hispanic whites, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Their death rate from several types of cardiovascular diseases, including a buildup of cholesterol on the walls of arteries called atherosclerosis, was 285.5 per 100,000 people versus 220.1 for whites.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for non-Hispanic Blacks, as it is for all Americans, including those age 45 and older. But Blacks overall are 20 percent more likely to die from heart disease than non-Hispanic whites, the CDC says. Black men fared worse than Black women — 351.3 deaths per 100,000 for men versus 236.5 for women — though both genders died of cardiovascular diseases at greater rates than whites.

The heart study's senior author, Saraschandra Vallabhajosyula, M.D., said it is important for medical professionals to evaluate how a patient's race, “along with their sex, age, insurance status and socioeconomic status,” may influence the care they are provided.

"The complex interplay of these important nonclinical risk factors, also called social determinants of health, need careful evaluation. Only when we eliminate these disparities can we say health care is truly equitable,” Vallabhajosyula, a fellow of interventional cardiology at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, said in a statement.