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• Posted November 5, 2024

Higher Heart Rate May Help Spur A-fib in Black Patients

An elevated heart rate could provide an important clue to which Black adults often have a dangerous heart rhythm disorder, a new study finds.

Higher resting heart rate is associated with increased risk of atrial fibrillation, researchers found.

What’s more, the higher a person’s heart rate, the higher their risk for A-fib, results showed.

Every 10-beats-per-minute increase in heart rate is associated with a 9% higher risk of developing afib, researchers reported recently in the journal JAMA Network Open.

This study is the first to look specifically at A-fib risk among Black patients, said lead researcher Dr. Vid Yogeswaran, a cardiologist with the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.

“This study is useful because, among Black adults, we know little about risk factors for cardiovascular disease -- and specifically for A-fib, which can lead to heart failure, stroke, dementia and death,” Yogeswaran said in a university news release.

“Paradoxically, Black adults have a lower reported clinical prevalence of atrial fibrillation than white adults, but have a much higher risk of A-Fib-associated consequences such as stroke and death,” Yogeswaran added.

With A-fib, the upper chambers of the heart, called the atria, start to beat irregularly.

This allows blood to pool and potentially clot in the atria, increasing a person’s risk of stroke.

Untreated A-fib raises a person’s risk of stroke fivefold, and also doubles the risk of heart-related death, according to the American Heart Association.

For their report, researchers analyzed data from the Jackson Heart Study, a long-term research project tracking the heart health of adult Black patients in Jackson, Miss.

They followed nearly 5,000 people who had no A-fib diagnosis as of 2000, to see if they developed the heart rhythm disorder by 2016.

The average resting heart rate among patients at the beginning of the study was 65 beats per minute.

During the follow-up period, more than 450 patients developed A-fib -- and an increase in their heart rate over time was linked to their risk of the disorder, researchers found.

Further, the association between resting heart rate and A-fib persisted even after researchers accounted for other risk factors like age, high blood pressure, elevated BMI and lack of exercise.

Previous studies of A-fib have mostly focused on people of European descent, and the relationship between heart rate and the disorder has not been clear among Black patients, the researchers noted.

“Some studies say it's only low [resting heart rate that poses risk for A-Fib]. Some studies say it's only high. None of the studies has been powered enough to detect the resting heart-rate risk among Black adults,” Yogeswaran said. 

“Our paper shows that high resting heart rate is the risk among Black adults,” Yogeswaran concluded.

However, more research is needed to determine whether resting heart rate can serve as a useful screening tool for A-fib among Black patients, researchers noted.

More information

The American Heart Association has more about atrial fibrillation.

SOURCE: University of Washington, news release, Oct. 30, 2024