‘Africans have higher sudden cardiac arrest risk, smaller brains’

BLACK is beautiful but it comes with other baggage’s. Black people, mostly Africans, were found to be significantly likely to experience sudden cardiac arrests than white people, and their children, who are largely poorer, have smaller brains.

A new study published in the journal Circulation, led by Dr. Sumeet S. Chugh, associate director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, CA, who examined data on residents in the metropolitan area of Portland, OR, who had sudden cardiac arrests between 2002 and 2012.

A cardiac arrest is when the heart’s electrical system malfunctions, preventing the heart from pumping blood around the body. Sudden cardiac arrests are a major cause of death even in Nigeria. In the United States (U.S.), it is the leading to around 300,000 to 350,000 deaths a year – around 50 per cent of all cardiovascular deaths.

According to the authors of the study, there is little information regarding sudden cardiac arrest in nonwhite racial groups in the US. Previous studies carried out two to three decades ago estimated a higher incidence of cardiac arrests among black people than white people, but these studies were limited by only assessing cardiac arrest incidence through narrow sets of parameters.

Also, a study of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of the brains of healthy children has revealed that poverty produces structural changes and worse assessments of academic achievement.

The results published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics suggest the differences for low-income children could explain “as much as an estimated 20 per cent of the achievement gap.”

Seth Pollak, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and colleagues analyzed MRI scans of 389 children and adolescents aged between four and 22 years who were developing typically. Complete sociodemographic and neuroimaging data were available for them.

The children’s scores on cognitive and academic achievement tests were also taken with the scans of brain tissue, which included gray matter of the total brain, frontal lobe, temporal lobe and hippocampus.

The researchers found regional gray matter volumes were eight to 10 per cent below the developmental norm in the brains of children below the federal poverty level.

Children below 150 per cent of the federal poverty level had regional gray matter brain volumes three to four per cent below the developmental norm.

The researchers say socioeconomic disparities in school readiness and academic performance are well documented. On standardized tests in the study, children from low-income households scored four to seven percentage points lower.

Little has been known about the mechanisms underlying the influence of poverty on children’s academic achievement, however.

For the Circulation study, the researchers utilized data from the Oregon Sudden Unexpected Death Study (SUDS) to compare the medical histories of sudden cardiac arrest patients by race. The Oregon SUDS is an ongoing community-based study that uses multiple sources to ascertain the number of out-of-hospital sudden cardiac arrests occurring in the Portland area.

The researchers collected data for a total of 1,745 white residents and 179 black residents that experienced sudden cardiac arrest during the study period.

They found that black residents were more than twice as likely as white people to experience sudden cardiac arrest, with 175 black men and 90 black women per 100,000 experiencing sudden cardiac arrest compared with 84 white men and 40 white women per 100,000.