Hispanic Women's Hearts at High Risk: Study

FRIDAY, March 2 (HealthDay News) -- Hispanic women develop cardiac risk factors much earlier than white women, typically exhibiting the heart health of a white woman 10 years older, a new study finds.

The research suggests that being Hispanic may be an independent risk factor for heart disease, and that these women need to be identified and treated earlier.

"The tendency for medical practice is to assume that Hispanics have a delayed onset or less prevalence of cardiac disease, and our study shows that they have earlier onset and the same risk as Caucasians," said study author Dr. John Teeters, a cardiology fellow at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y.

"Physicians should be more aggressively targeting this population for identification of risk factors such as cholesterol and obesity and recognizing that a 20- or 30-year-old Hispanic may have the same risk factors as a 30- or 40-year-old Caucasian," he said.

Teeters was to present the findings Friday at the American Heart Association's annual conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention, in Orlando, Fla.

The findings turn the so-called "Hispanic Paradox" on its head. This medical notion has long held that Hispanics have less heart disease than whites do, despite having higher rates of risk factors.

But Teeters and his colleagues found that Hispanic women have earlier onset of disease, more risk factors, and an equal, if not higher, risk of cardiac disease.

"We did the study because the literature shows that the risk is less. But, in actual clinical practice, Hispanic patients are coming in with alotof risk factors," he said. In other words, there appeared to be a wide gap between theory and practice.

For this study, the researchers conducted a series of free community health screenings at churches, community centers and outpatient clinics that primarily serve Hispanics. The outreach clinics were funded by Pfizer Inc., the pharmaceutical giant, but Pfizer did not fund data analysis or contribute to presentation of the data, the authors stated.

Medical histories were collected for 79 Hispanic women, along with measurements of blood pressure, body mass index, waist circumference, lipid profiles and blood sugar.

A group of 91 white women served as the control group. The average age of the Hispanic women was 53 vs. 63 in the white group. Only 61 percent of the Hispanic women were postmenopausal, compared with 85 percent of the white women.

Despite age differences and differences in menopausal status, heart disease risk for the two ethnic groups was about the same.