Due to the reasons listed, the American Heart Association says that Black women are 26% more likely to be labeled than White women. Shanshan Sheehy, Sc.D., the study’s lead author and an assistant professor at Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center and Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, says, “Many Black adults in the U.S. are already at a higher risk of getting heart disease because they have high blood pressure or Type 2 diabetes.”
“There is evidence that racism may be a chronic stressor on the human body. Chronic stress can lead to high blood pressure, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke.”
About 48,000 people who took part in the Black Women’s Health Study from 1997 to 2019 gave their information. Researchers looked into whether people who thought they were being treated unfairly by other people had a higher chance of getting coronary heart disease.
In 1997, the people who took part were asked to answer questions about how racism affected their daily lives, such as “How often do people act as if they think you are lying?” “Have you ever been treated unfairly because of your race at work (hiring, promotion, firing), in housing (renting, buying, mortgage), or when dealing with the police (stopped, searched, threatened)?”
The researchers then added up the points and found that the women who said they had been treated unfairly had a 26% higher chance of getting heart disease.
“Structural racism is real,” said Michelle A. Albert, M.D., M.P.H., FAHA. “It happens on the job, in schools, and with the criminal justice system.” Albert is the head of the American Heart Association, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), the Admissions Dean for the UCSF Medical School, and one of the authors of the study.
“Now that we have hard evidence linking it to heart disease, we as a society need to work on the things that create the barriers that keep structural racism going.” She also said, “Future research needs to look at the effects of perceived interpersonal racism and structural racism on cardiovascular health, as well as the effects of both.”