BEIJING, June 17 /PRNewswire-Asia/ — Racial-ethnic
groups living in a similar environment and with access to universal
healthcare differed strikingly in their cardiovascular risk
profiles according to new data presented today at the World
Congress of Cardiology (WCC) Scientific Sessions in Beijing, China.
Chinese people have the most favorable cardiovascular risk
profile, followed by White, South Asians and then Blacks according
to the study presented. Moreover, diabetes occurred earlier in
South Asian men and women, and Black women than in people of White
or Chinese origin. A similar racial-ethnic gradient was observed in
the prevalence of heart disease (3.2 per cent in Chinese to a high
of 5.2 per cent in South Asians) and stroke (0.6 per cent in
Chinese to a high of 1.7 per cent in South Asians).
“Cardiovascular disease is a global health problem and even
though Chinese, South Asians and Blacks represent approximately 60
per cent of the world’s population and contribute significantly to
the global burden of this disease, most of our knowledge about
cardiovascular risk is derived from White populations,” said Maria Chiu, Doctoral Research Fellow,
Institute for Clinical Evaluation Sciences, Toronto, Canada. “The data generated by
our study will be invaluable for designing evidence-based
prevention programs and for planning health services in an
increasingly multi-ethnic world.”
The population-based study compared cardiovascular risk factors
and diseases of some 163,797 participants (154,653 White, 3,038
Chinese, 3,364 South Asian, 2,742 Black) in Statistics Canada’s
National Population Health Survey and Canadian Community Health
Surveys between 1996 and 2007. Direct age-sex sta
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