Heart disease study reveals unexpected risk

The prevailing belief in medicine has been that Hispanic people are less likely to suffer heart attack or stroke than Caucasian people. But, more recent data suggest that this may actually be completely backwards, and that Hispanic people - especially women - are at a much greater risk at a younger age than their Caucasian counterparts.

These findings were presented last year at the 47th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevented, presented by the American Heart Association. The study was held by researchers in the department of cardiology at the University of Rochester, revealing that Hispanic women who are ten years younger than Caucasian women are at equal risk of heart disease. In the study, 79 Hispanic and 91 Caucasian women were examined. The average age among the Hispanic women was 53, whereas the average age for the Caucasian women was 63. When compared, the heart disease risk for the two groups was almost the same, even though the Hispanic women were ten years younger than the Caucasian women.

What causes this disparity remains unclear. But, what is being looked at are the methods by which population census data is gathered and how accurate it truly is.