reflection of how it was assessed, particularly among Black women.
That’s not surprising given how complicated resilience can be to measure, said Dr. Michelle Albert, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and author of an editorial that accompanied the study.
“There are no great resilience scales. None of them can really capture even just a blush of resilience,” said Albert, director of UCSF’s Center for the Study of Adversity and Cardiovascular Disease.
Albert commends the study for both the way it looked at experiences over a stretch of time and for focusing on black women.
“There’s usually a comparison between whites and blacks, or blacks and somebody else. It’s not usually where just black women are looked at, and that’s very commendable on the part of the authors,” she says.
Researchers called it “unfortunate” that few studies have investigated the link between stress and cardiovascular disease in large groups of black women, especially since this population is disproportionately affected by psychosocial challenges including limited access to health care, lower median household incomes, less access to healthy food choices, and higher exposure to crime when compared to white women.
Albert said looking at race-related connections is key to “getting to the bottom of the issue, in part because Black women, among all women, have some of the worst outcomes in cardiovascular disease and are often shuffled aside under the rubric of ‘women.'”
“It’s really important they looked only among black women,” Albert says. “In general, the whole concept of black women’s race or ethnicity is usually very much minimized.”
Heart failure is very prevalent and real in the Black community and especially for Black women. See your doctor and get tested if you are experiencing any chest pains or symptoms. For more information on heart failure, visit our Health Conditions page on BlackDoctor.org.
Tia Muhammad, BS, is an award-winning freelance content & media creative, copywriter, blogger, digital designer, and marketing consultant. She owns the boutique content and digital media company, jackieGLDN|studio.
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