While obesity is considered a cardiovascular risk factor, a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) showed that African-American patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) have much less fat around their hearts compared to Caucasian patients.
"Prior evidence suggests that increased fat around the heart may be either an independent marker of CAD burden or a predictor of the future risk of acute coronary events," said U. Joseph Schoepf, M.D., professor of radiology and medicine and director of cardiovascular imaging at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, S.C. "You would think that African Americans, who have a higher prevalence of CAD, would have higher rates of thoracic fat in an acute chest pain setting. However, this was not the case. White patients had significantly higher thoracic fat volumes than African-American patients."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronary heart disease is the leading cause of death for people of most ethnicities in the United States. In 2010, the age-adjusted prevalence of coronary heart disease was 6.5 percent among African Americans, compared to 5.8 percent among Caucasians.
"We were very interested in finding an explanation for the racial difference in CAD and suspected differences in thoracic adipose tissue between races might be one of the contributing factors," said Paul Apfaltrer, M.D., from the Institute of Clinical Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, University Medical Center Mannheim, Heidelberg University, Germany.