Black and white?

Startling statistics from a study just published in JAMA; an excerpt from the www.cnn.com article:

Black people were 22 percent less likely to be transferred from a hospital that did not do such procedures to one that did, it found. And when they were, black people were 23 percent less likely to get these operations than white people, the researchers said.

In the first month after a heart attack, black people were 9 percent less likely to die than white people, the researchers said, perhaps because whites were more likely to undergo specialized procedures that sometimes can be fatal.

But in the period from a month to a year after the heart attack, blacks were up to 26 percent more likely to die than whites, the study found.

"I wished we knew what's going on," lead researcher Dr. Ioana Popescu of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine and the VA Medical Center in Iowa City said in a telephone interview.

The study was not designed to find the reasons for the disparities.

Click here to access the article.