Black heart health: What’s being done?

Stopping to catch your breath after running a 5K, playing a wind instrument, the rapid acceleration of your heartbeat when you enter a job interview. Our hearts work hard every day to keep us alive and power our daily lives, but we usually don’t think about heart health —at least, not as much as taking care of our gut or skin. Heart disease is the number one killer in the U.S., however, and it is disproportionately higher in Black Americans. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), the mortality rate for African Americans who have cardiovascular diseases is 32 percent higher for heart disease. The risks are higher because of systemic factors and adverse social determinants of health, or the conditions in which a person is born and lives. Health disparities exist because of several factors, some of which are social: the National Academy of Medicine discovered that minorities receive lower-quality healthcare than white people, even when other factors like insurance, income, age and severity of conditions were comparable. It reported that minorities were less likely to be given appropriate cardiac care, for instance. AHA’s data supports this, as seen in its study of 17,755 patients hospitalized between 2000 and...