An Epidemiological Perspective on Race/Ethnicity and Stroke

Stroke disparities among self-defined ethnic and racial groups exist in the USA and in other countries. While ethnicity carries an inherent cultural connotation, race is less well defined. Emerging evidence suggest that race is more a social construct than a biologically plausible category of humans. Nonetheless, disparities exist in multiple measures of cerebrovascular health across ethnic and racial groups. For example, the risk of stroke among non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics in the USA is two-to-three times higher than non-Hispanic white population. Although examples of genetic segregation may be invoked to explain these disparities, the evidence reviewed here suggests that important difference exist in environmental and clinical factors that may contribute more importantly to the observed stroke disparities. Despite the caveats of using race and ethnicity as homogenous categories, there is value in using these constructs to target preventive measures in populations at a high risk of cerebrovascular disease. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York.