Chinese least likely to get cardiovascular disease

14 July 2010

Racial-ethnic groups living in a similar environment and with access to universal healthcare differ strikingly in their cardiovascular risk profiles according to a study presented last month at the World Congress of Cardiology (WCC) Beijing, China.

Chinese people have the most favourable cardiovascular risk profile, followed by White, South Asians and then Blacks according to the study presented. Moreover, diabetes occurs 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% in Chinese to a high of 5.2% in South Asians) and stroke (0.6% in Chinese to a high of 1.7% in South Asians).

"Cardiovascular disease is a global health problem and even though Chinese, South Asians and Blacks represent approximately 60% 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 standardized methods were used to estimate ethnic-specific prevalence of eight cardiovascular risk factors, heart disease and stroke.