14 DAY TRIAL // University of Leicester investigators have determined that people with low income are four times more likely to receive a heart failure diagnostic than their peers who are wealthy, or only moderately-better off. Economically-disadvantaged communities were found to hold most heart failure cases.
Another population that was found to be at an increased risk was that of South Asians, who were 200 percent more likely to receive the same diagnostic than the average.
This investigation reveals a massive series of gaps in cardiovascular health in various ethnic and socio-economic communities, investigators at the university say. This work is the first to look at hearth health problems from this perspective.
The results were published in a PhD research paper entitled “Failing Hearts – does race matter? Epidemiology of heart failure in a multi-ethnic population.” The work was authored by UL Department of Cardiovascular Sciences expert Dr Hanna Blackledge, a PhD student.
Over the past 20 years or so, hospitalization rates for heart failure cases in the general population has increased more than 300 percent. As such, identifying the groups most at risk could help alleviate the issue, and reduce the monetary strain these conditions place on the national healthcare systems.
Heart failure is not an easy condition to deal with. Many cardiovascular diseases lead to this outcome, which only 60 percent of patients survive the first year. The remaining 40 percent die within less than 12 months, AlphaGalileo reports.
“This was the first comprehensive study of heart failure outcomes based on long-term observation of an unselected population. It was also the first study looking in detail at burden of heart failure and its risk factors in South Asian populations resident in the UK,” says Dr. Blackledge.
“Hanna’s research makes an important contribution to what we know about heart failure in a typical Western, industrialized society,” adds UL professor of cardiovascular medicine Iain Squire, her PhD supervisor.
“In addition to demonstrating the overall magnitude of this increasingly important public health issue, the research shows the burden of illness in specific groups in our population, in particular ethnic minority, or socioeconomically deprived patients,” the expert says.
“Public Health policy and health service provision will be informed and guided by Dr Blackledge’s work,” the professor adds,” saying that effective heart failure diagnosis and treatment remains the best way to go about reducing the incidence this disease has in the population.
“By the year 2030 there will be 50% more elderly people in the population and the importance of these conditions and scope for preventing them will rise even further,” Dr Blackledge concludes.