Social factors, such as stress and personality traits, may play a greater role in explaining the higher rates of hypertension among blacks, researchers at Johns Hopkins found.
“Most people think it’s biological, but we believe it’s behavioral or environmental,” said Roland James Thorpe Jr., an assistant scientist with the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Thorpe is the lead author of a study being published in the November edition of Social Science and Medicine.
Researchers compared hypertension, or high blood pressure, rates among blacks and whites living in similar social environments in a Southwest Baltimore neighborhood. The groups had comparable incomes and education.
Nearly 31 percent of the hypertension disparity is attributable to environmental factors, according to the study.
“We can’t just attribute things directly to race,” he said. “We need to take into account other [factors],” such as stress, coping strategies and other personality characteristics.
Blacks have higher incidence and mortality rates in several major diseases — including diabetes and cardiovascular disease — than their white counterparts, according to the American Cancer Society.
Hypertension, which affects 65 million American adults, is one of the common risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
“It’s very common and largely found in African-Americans,” Thorpe said.
In Maryland, black middle-aged adults have 30 percent more diagnosed cases of hypertension than whites, and older black adults have 17 percent more diagnosed cases of hypertension than older whites, according to the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
More research needs to be done to explain that gap, said Carlessia Hussein of the state health department’s Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities, who was familiar with the study.
“When people have similar social environmental circumstances, they will have similar health status, but they acknowledge that there are other areas that are determining elevated blood pressure in African-Americans,” Hussein said of the research.
Blacks may cope with stress differently than whites, she said. Or they tend to take less advantage of services or lack the social support that whites enjoy.
“Even when you adjust for socioeconomics,” she said, “you still see the differences here.”
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