Black adults in the United States developed heart failure at a
startling rate 20 times higher than did whites, even dying of it
decades before the condition typically strikes whites, in a large
study of the causes of heart disease, according to researchers.
Heart failure typically occurs in the elderly and is rare in
young adults. Researchers did not expect to see much of it among the
5,115 young blacks and whites, evenly split along racial and sex
lines, whom they had followed to learn about heart disease. But
after 20 years, 27 participants in the study had developed heart
failure, all but one of them black.
Most of the heart failure patients were in their 30s and 40s.
Three black men and two black women with heart failure died during
the study period.
The researchers estimated that heart failure strikes one in 100
blacks under age 50 in the United States. The study was to be
published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
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