Rates of HF death lower, HF hospitalization higher in Black vs. white patients
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Black patients experienced a higher rate of HF hospitalization and a lower rate of HF death compared with white patients, according to an analysis published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
“Previous studies have found racial and ethnic variations in HF-related hospitalizations and death rates of people with HF,” Alan S. Go, MD, director of the comprehensive clinical research unit at Kaiser Permanente Northern California, told Healio. “We wanted to update these past findings to see if differences remain and look for possible explanations if these differences still exist.”
To investigate the association of race and ethnicity with HF outcomes, researchers analyzed 34,621 patients from the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health care system — 66.1% white, 11.9% Hispanic, 11.5% Asian/Pacific islander and 10.5% Black — with HF (59.3% with HF with preserved ejection fraction).
According to the researchers, Black patients had a higher rate of HF hospitalization (adjusted HR = 1.28; 95% CI, 1.18-1.38) and a lower rate of HF death (aHR = 0.78; 95% CI, 0.72-0.85) compared with white patients.
In addition, compared with white patients, Asian/Pacific islander patients had similar rates of HF hospitalization but lower rates of all-cause hospitalization (aHR = 0.89; 95% CI, 0.85-0.93) and death (aHR = 0.75; 95% CI, 0.69-0.8), and Hispanic patients had a lower rate of death (aHR = 0.85; 95% CI, 0.8-0.91).
“The higher rates of hospitalization for Black patients with HF suggests there is a continued need to better understand the social, environmental and medical factors that lead these patients to be hospitalized more often and ways to prevent potentially unnecessary hospitalizations,” Go told Healio. “Our findings underscore how important it is to standardize, yet personalize, care for high-risk patients with HF and to look at the underlying socioeconomic factors that affect how individual people access the health care system; there are areas we need to explore further to see how we can maximize the effectiveness of the care we provide to HF patients to both avoid preventable hospitalizations and improve survival, regardless of race or ethnicity.”
For more information:
Alan S. Go, MD, can be reached at alan.s.go@kp.org.
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