How Do Economic Factors and Heart Disease Rates Relate in the New York Metropolitan Area?
It is common knowledge that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States of America. In 2010 alone cardiovascular disease claimed the lives of 597,689 Americans, more than 20,000 more people than the next leading cause of death, cancer (Leading Causes). It is also widely believed that heart disease kills mainly those in the lower socio-economic strata. So how then do we account for the New York City metropolitan area? This is a region in which some of the wealthiest counties, not only in the metro but in the entire country suffer some of the highest rates of fatal heart disease. While the poorer urban counties that comprise New York City do generally have the highest rates of fatal heart disease in the metro, the wealthier and more middle class counties come close and sometimes exceed these rates. According to an article in the New York Times much of the metro area has heart disease rates that meet or exceed those of impoverished rural areas, places traditionally considered to be at the highest risk for heart disease. Some speculate that these high rates are caused by the stress of living in a major metropolitan area, or even high levels of income inequality (Fessenden). This is a long-standing issue as well. From the same NY Times article,
New York State has had one of the country's highest rates of heart disease deaths for many years. In 1994, a group of epidemiologists at the State University at Albany set out to see if it was a consequence of poor health in New York City and concluded it was not: Suburban areas, where the incidence of the disease was lower than in the city, still had worse death rates than in 42 other...
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...tion. Retrieved from http://nccd.cdc.gov/dhdspatlas/
I used this interactive atlas to find the heart disease mortality rate for each county in the New York Metro.
Leading Causes of Death. (2013). Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm
This webpage provides statistics for the leading causes of death in America in the year 2010.
U.S. Metropolitan Areas by Living Costs. (2012). Pew Foundation. Retrieved from http://pewresearch.org/files/old-assets/pdf/MSAsbylivingcosts.pdf
This is a ranking of all U.S. metro areas by cost of living. It shows that the New York metro has the highest cost of living in the country.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). State & County Quickfacts. Retrieved from http://quickfacts.census.gov.
I used the U.S. census to compile the median household income for each county in the New York metro.
I chose not to use any of the prompts provided, but instead connect the article to what I learned in my sociology class lass quarter. In class we watched part one of film series of Unnatural causes, titled Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making us Sick "In Sickness and in Wealth". While reading the article this reminded me about the cases studied in the film to see whether wealth inequality contributes to making people sick. In the film they focused on the social determinants of health, wealth and education. In both the article and part one of the film Unnatural Causes they focused on three different individuals and how their health are affected by they choices they make and the access they have to care.
People in lower classes are more likely to get sicker more often and to die quicker. People in metro Louisville reveal 5- and 10-year gaps in life expectancy between the city’s rich, middle- and working-class neighborhoods. Those who live in the working class neighborhood face more stressors like unpaid bills, jobs that pay little to nothing, unsafe living conditions, and the fewest resources available to help them, all of these contribute to the health issues.
New York has the 25th highest poverty rate in the United States. According to the Ameri...
If we were to apply a longitude exposure study over the span of 42 years from the time an inner-city child is born, we may conclude that life experiences resulting from potential malnutrition, underprivileged environments, and overall lack of health education are the leading contributors to adult African American deaths. Studies show that 8 of the 10 leading causes in the deaths of African Americans are medical diseases, which with proper education and care may have been prevented and/or addressed earlier in their lives to diagnose and treat. Heart Disease is the leading cause of death for African Americans. When compared to other ethnicities, some form of heart disease causes 24.5% of African American deaths. These numbers are astounding considering Blacks make up approximately only 14.2% of the total U.S. population.
Prior to taking it, I was unaware that the greatest difference in life expectancy observed between counties in the U.S. was 15 years. I was amazed that simply being born in a different zip code could affect life expectancy so greatly. This profoundly supports the conclusion environment affects health. Health expert Michael Marmot realized that a subway ride from an impoverished African American neighborhood to an affluent white suburb in Washington D.C. saw an average increased life expectancy of a year and a half for every mile traveled, totaling up to twenty years. We cannot control the neighborhood we are born into, and to see that such an uncontrollable factor can affect longevity so greatly in an industrialized nation, like the U.S., is astonishing (“Health equity quiz”, 2008). I was particularly amazed that in west Los Angeles, white neighborhoods have nearly 19 times as much green space as Black and Latino neighborhoods. The white neighborhoods have nearly 31.8 acres of park space for every 1,000 people, while the minority neighborhoods only have 1.7 acres of park space (“Health equity quiz”, 2008). Traveling in Las Vegas, parks can be found in nearly every area. Although there are probably more parks in wealthier areas, we do not see such a great discrepancy in our numbers-- or so it appears. To see that such a heavily populated city, like Los Angeles, treats residents so disproportionately was
Mensah, G. A., Mokdad, A. H., Ford, E. S., Greenlund, K. J., & Croft, J. B. (2005, January 24). State of Disparities in Cardiovascular Health in the United States. Circulation. Retrieved April 28, 2014, from http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/111/10/1233.short
6 American Community Survey Demographic and Housing Estimates: 2008. U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau. http:// factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&- qr_name=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_DP5&-ds_name=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_&-_ lang=en&-redoLog=false&-format=
Heart disease is of utmost and imperative concern in the United States. It stands at the top of the list for causes of death in the U.S., and it can be absolutely devastating (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2013). In part one of the health disparities paper, disparity in relation to heart disease was pointed out in those of low socioeconomic status and/or minorities. Part two of this paper has been streamlined towards a more specific minority: African Americans women. The reason for focusing on the African American women population is that there is a huge amount of disparity seen specifically in this group. As of 2009, African Americans as a whole had 30% more of a chance of dying from cardiovascular disease than Caucasians (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office of Minority Health [OMH], 2012). The rate of Cardiovascular Disease in African American women specifically is higher at 48.9% than the rate of CVD in African American men at 44.4%, showing even greater disparity in African American women (American Heart Association, 2013). The goal of this paper is to identify and appraise two different articles surrounding this topic. Both articles involve an intervention in which similar community prevention programs were implemented in hopes to reduce the risk of CVD in African American women.
United States Census Bureau. (2012e). American FactFinder: Erie County: Median household income. Retrieved from http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml
According to the 2000 Census, over 152,000 people live in Central Harlem, the majority of those inhabitants being African American and of that population 26% are children. In 2003, when a study of health was conducted within the neighborhood it was found that a disproportionate amount of the population subscribed to various ailments including stroke, cancer, infant mortality , heart disease and asthma among this population was four times higher than other parts of New York City.
Atherosclerosis is a disease that occurs when arteries become blocked, inflamed, or hardened. As a result of this, blood cannot easily pass through the artery, and blood pressure increases. Many people suffer from atherosclerosis as they age, but young people can be affected by atherosclerosis also. There are many preventative steps that can be taken to decrease the risk of atherosclerosis; however, if atherosclerosis does develop in the arteries, medications can be given to help the individual receive adequate blood flow to important tissues. Atherosclerosis is a very serious condition that requires medical attention and a change in life style because it is a precursor to many dangerous and potentially fatal diseases.
Urban asthma is considered one of the most rapid growing epidemics nationwide. Jason Corburn states in the article Urban asthma and the neighborhood environment in New York City, that in large urban areas, the prevalence of asthma is much more severe. There is a large body of observational studies that have been conducted on the causes of asthma in urban areas and it’s inextricable link to the socio-economic status of a neighborhood. Asthma is more likely to affect an individual from a poor urban neighborhood such as East Harlem in New York City versus someone living in the wealthy, affluent Upper East Side. There are many evident factors confirming that the prevalence of asthma is more likely to be found in East Harlem and not in the Upper East Side, such as tobacco smoke, allergens from open air trash receptacles, availability of products and even the type of promotion towards the target audience.
Figure 11 pie chart showing the deaths due to cardiovascular disease in the USA (amercian heart association, 2014)
Coronary heart disease is a condition where the arteries in the heart clog up with fatty deposits called plague which damages blood vessels. This is a process called atherosclerosis. The arteries then become narrower causing minimal blood to reach the body leading to heart attacks and potentially strokes due to the decreased flow of blood to and from the heart.
By analyzing the medical, cultural and social perspectives we are able to examine leading factors of heart disease as well researching possible devices and medication that can help in dealing with heart disease. All the articles agree that heart disease is a major problem, Morales further found that heart disease is the leading cause of death for both Hispanics and Americans—other cultures are unknown (Morales, Kington, pg. 8). However, the most common heart disease are coronary heart disease and cardiovascular disease with coronary heart disease being the leading cause of death in the United States (Kones, pg. 325-326; Stephen, Marmot, pg. 6).