According to one of the first long-term studies to look at heart failure in younger adults, blacks tend to suffer the condition at a rate 20 times higher than whites do before age 50.

 

“Blacks in their 30s and 40s develop heart failure at rates seen in whites in their 50s and 60s,” study leader Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, MD, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco, said.

 

Bibbins-Domingo and her team followed 5,115 young people – about half of them African-American, about half of them females – who underwent regular medical exams over the first 20 years of the ongoing study. When the study began in 1985-1986, the participants were 18 to 30 years old – most in their early 20s. Of them, 27 had heart failure at an average age of 39. All but one of them were African-American.

 

“It has been known for some time that blacks have more heart failure and may be slightly younger when they develop heart failure, but ours is the first study to document how high these rates are at younger ages,” Bibbins-Domingo said.

 

Trying to explain the findings, she said that blacks often have no health insurance, they have the feeling that they do not need to see a doctor and their high blood pressure is not treated appropriately because they are young adults thought to have no medical problems at all.

 

“In our study, almost 90 percent of blacks with high blood pressure didn't have it treated. It was the same for whites,” Bibbins-Domingo said.

 

Of all people developing heart failure, 87 percent had blood pressure that was untreated or poorly controlled.