Raising troubling questions about health care for blacks, researchers report today that blacks are significantly more likely to suffer and die from sudden heart failure than whites, and that whites with heart disease are far more likely to undergo surgery to correct it than blacks.
The findings, published in separate articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, highlight striking racial differences that, in the case of the second study, cannot be attributed to socioeconomic factors, such as the ability to pay.
One explanation, experts say, is that prejudice influences physicians' judgment, preventing white doctors from recommending certain procedures to black patients, or patients from accepting them. Only 3 percent of the nation's doctors are black.
"We are dependent on the majority of the population for health services," said Dr. Edward S. Cooper, a prominent black physician and past president of the American Heart Association.
The studies send an important message to the nation's health care reformers that financial barriers are not the sole reason some Americans do not receive quality medical care.
Each of the studies published today breaks new ground. The first, conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, offers the first large-scale comparison of cardiac arrest among blacks and whites. It found that blacks were twice as likely as whites to suffer cardiac arrest, and more than three times as likely to die of it.
The second, and in some ways more disturbing, study was a nationwide examination of nearly 430,000 Veterans Administration hospital patients with heart disease. The study was undertaken by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the Pittsburgh Veteran Affairs Medical Center.
It found that even when finances are not a consideration, whites were two and three times as likely as blacks to undergo surgical procedures.
The findings add to a well-documented body of research that shows blacks in the United States die of cardiovascular disease faster than whites. Scientists do not fully understand the reasons for this and are investigating biological causes.
In the Chicago study, Dr. Lance Becker and his colleagues in the emergency department of the University of Chicago Medical Center analyzed every cardiac arrest that occurred in their city over a two-year period, 6,451 cases in all.
