A Balanced Heart Is A Healthy Heart
Are you living from the heart? Find out. Take our brief quiz to get your own #LiveFromTheHeart tip sheet.
Take the quiz!
By Team Adesso | Posted Nov 7, 2024
The American Heart Association recently took a stand outlining issues that Asian Americans face impeding them from getting high quality heart health care and some steps that can be taken to remedy this. There are a variety of issues that can be faced by this group when it comes to diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease including: lack of research, linguistic and/or socioeconomic barriers, and racism or the fear of it.
Are you living from the heart? Find out. Take our brief quiz to get your own #LiveFromTheHeart tip sheet.
Take the quiz!Much like many documents people are asked to fill out, the category representing every Asian ethnicity is often listed as either “Asian” or “Asian American.” Worse yet, sometimes this is lumped in with Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander when it comes to medical research or excluded in its entirety because the sample size is too small. According to the September 2024 Circulation, funding for National Institutes of Health research on this population is less than 0.17% of its budget between 1992 and 2018.
Given that Asian American people represent a wide number of ethnicities which each have different incidences and types of cardiovascular health issues, it’s vital that each ethnic group be separated out. In fact, in the AHA’s Circulation article, the doctors wrote, “The absence of disaggregated data is itself a mechanism of structural racism against Asian Americans.”
Many groups of Asian Americans and the population as a whole have experienced racism throughout the United States’ history and particularly recently during the COVID-19 pandemic. This added a level of fear and distrust when it comes to seeking medical care.
Particularly for newly emigrated Asian Americans, their knowledge and familiarity of the American health care system and engagement with it can be limited. Acknowledging this and studying this issue could yield solutions.
