?Structural racism? reflected in regional cardiovascular death rates

These data included crime rates, housing vacancies, smoking, diabetes, obesity, and food scarcity.The analysis revealed parallel declines in CVD deaths among all groups.However, Dr. Shreya Rao, the study’s lead author and research fellow at the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, recounted:“We were surprised to find that even though CVD death rates improved across the country, including in areas where rates had been among the highest and the lowest, relative differences across county groups and existing disparities among counties did not change. And some factors may be modifiable through public policy and health systems changes and programs.”A 2020 AHA presidential advisory calls out structural racism as a “fundamental cause of persistent health disparities in the U.S.”Racism impacts individual and population health through “redlining and racialized residential segregation, mass incarceration, police violence, and unequal medical care,” according to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine.“We observed that counties with high mortality trajectory had a higher proportion of Black adults and worse measures of social distress, including higher housing vacancy rates and violent crime rates and low levels of high school education,” explains Dr. Rao.