The current findings are based on a national comparison of more than 108,000 white, black and Hispanic cardiac patients who received care for severe heart failure between 2005 and 2007 at one of more than 1,000 hospitals across the United States.
All the patients were enrolled in the National Cardiovascular Data Registry, which by definition meant that all were Medicare patients and all had received either ICD alone or the combined CRT-D treatment.
Despite the fact that minority patients were actually more likely to qualify for the combined approach than white patients, the authors found that blacks and Hispanics were nonetheless more likely to receive just the defibrillator device. By contrast, white patients were more likely to get the double therapy -- whether or not they met the treatment guidelines.
Farmer and his colleagues specifically found that among white patients considered "eligible" for CRT-D, 79 percent got the treatment. However, among blacks, that figure fell to 77 percent, and among Hispanics it fell further, to 75 percent.
"Now certainly these are not whopping differences," Farmer noted. "They're modest, and other studies have shown this kind of difference in the past. But what's new here is that all the many factors that typically might account for the differences we did see -- being uninsured, the lack of availability of a particular device, patient preferences, the specific medical condition being handled -- cannot explain it."
"This is because," he continued, "all the patients in our study were from a group where everyone had gone to a doctor and gotten diagnostic testing, and everyone was already set to get treatment for their heart failure with a device of some kind. And an expensive device at that. It's just that you were more likely to g
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