Report urges culturally sensitive heart care for US Hispanic population

US physicians must adopt “culturally relevant strategies” to reduce the burden of heart disease and stroke in the country’s burgeoning Hispanic population, a new report by the American Heart Association has urged.1

Hispanic people make up the largest and fastest growing ethnic minority group in the United States. Currently, 53 million people in the US—about a fifth—are Hispanic, and by 2030 this will rise to one in three, or about 133 million.

“Given the large Hispanic population in the US it would be very hard to improve the health of the nation if this population is left behind,” said Carlos Rodriguez, an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and chair of the report’s writing group.

In the 33 page report published online in the journal Circulation, Rodriguez and colleagues detailed the epidemiology of cardiovascular risk factors and disease among US Hispanic people, as well as the social, economic, and cultural factors that affect their health and their approach to healthcare.

Although cardiovascular …