[Posted Dec. 26, 2007]

10-Year Study Shows
Blacks With Alzheimer
Outlive White Patients

   (New Journal and Guide)—Scientists are not sure why African Americans and Hispanics with Alzheimer’s live longer.
But a recent University of California-San Francisco study concluded that black patients lived 40 percent longer. Hispanic patients lived 15 percent longer.
   “We were surprised by the finding,” said Kala M. Mehta, lead author of the study, and an assistant adjunct professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
“In fact, we had hypothesized that it would be in the other direction. So, now we’re hoping to do more research in the area of racial and ethnic differences and cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s to get at the reasons for why differences occur.”
    Of the more than five million Americans with Alzheimer’s, about three million Alzheimer’s patients are non-white.

   “This study didn’t address all of the reasons why, and there’s a lot more work that needs to be done in this area, but we found that African Americans and Latinos with Alzheimer’s lived on average longer than white patients with Alzheimer’s,” Mehta said.
    The 10-year study, which included 31,000 men and women aged 65 and older, was comprised of patients that were 81 percent white, 12 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic, and 1.5 percent Asian.
Researchers found that white patients were more likely to die than patients of other backgrounds. The death rate was 41 percent among whites compared to 30 percent among blacks and 21 percent for Hispanics.
    After accounting for all the demographic factors that might influence outcome, the researchers concluded that black and Hispanic Alzheimer’s patients had a lower risk for mortality than their white counterparts.
    Mehta and her colleagues stressed, however, that the pool of ADC patients examined was not necessarily representative of U.S. Alzheimer’s patients as a whole. Most patients received care outside of the confines of government funded centers.

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