• Posted September 2, 2025

Heart Failure Strikes Black Americans Almost 14 Years Earlier Than White Americans

Disparities in education and access to insurance mean that heart failure hits Black American adults nearly 14 years earlier than it does white Americans, new research shows. 

Among Black patients, heart failure typically sets in at about 60 years of age, compared to 73.6 on average for white patients.

The study, conducted by researchers at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, tracked the health records of more than 42,000 patients cared for at hundreds of hospitals nationwide.

It revealed "striking differences" in heart failure onset, "especially for Black patients,” said study lead author Xiaoning Huang. He's a research assistant professor of cardiology at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine.

The findings were published Sept. 1 in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Heart failure involves a deterioration in heart function, sometimes occurring after a heart attack, in which the heart fails to pump blood efficiently.  

More than 6 million Americans are currently diagnosed with the life-threatening condition, according to background information from the authors. 

The new study tracked the timing of heart failure diagnoses for patients treated between 2016 and 2019 at 713 hospitals across the United States. 

There was a big disparity in onset of the disease based on race, Huang's group reported.

Social and medical factors may collude to create such a gap, Huang said.

“Our study shows that social risk factors, including insurance status and area-level educational and economic opportunities, played a major role," he said in a Northwestern news release. "These factors often limit people’s access to quality health care and shape people’s health long before they develop heart problems."

Efforts to close the gap will require big changes from society as a whole, he stressed. 

“Raising awareness is the first step toward advocating for policies that ensure everyone has educational and economic opportunities, healthy food, affordable and high-quality care, and freedom from discrimination, so that neither your ZIP code nor your racial background determines how soon you face serious heart problems,” Huang said.

In the meantime, he said, health care providers and facilities may want to focus prevention efforts on certain communities.

“This means starting prevention earlier and screening risk factors sooner,” Huang said. “We also need social workers to connect patients to resources that address social needs in addition to medical ones.”

More information

There's more on preventing heart failure at the American Heart Association.

SOURCE: Northwestern University, news release, Sept. 1, 2025