High blood pressure rates in inner-city African-Americans

African Americans living in the inner-city have high blood rates five times above than the national average, according to a recent study by researchers at Rutgers University.

According to the authors, this study was the largest its kind comparing the development of hypertensive emergency in a United States inner city.

“These statistics are very alarming,” according to Zewditu Asfaw, M.D., cardiovascular surgeon at Ascension Providence Hospital in Southfield. “Dangerously high blood pressure can lead to potentially deadly strokes, heart attacks and acute kidney damage. This is a crisis facing the African American community.”

For this study researchers reviewed the medical records of more than 3,000 patients diagnosed with high blood pressure who received treatment in the emergency department at Newark’s Beth Israel Medical Center. The hospital serves predominantly African-American communities. Half of these patients had severe increases in blood pressure.

Dr. Asfaw agrees with suggestions by study researchers that targeted interventions to control diabetes, chronic heart and kidney disease, could to help reduce the development of high blood pressure and related serious complications.

For more information about treatments for high blood pressure, contact an Ascension hospital in Southeast Michigan at 1-866-501-3627.