African-American patients at Veterans Affairs hospitals have significantly lower death rates than whites, a surprising new study found.
The findings of the survey of 147 VA hospitals contrasts sharply with numerous studies that found black patients faring worse than white patients.
The new research, reported in yesterday’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, studied 36,509 patients who were treated for six common ailments.
In all of the categories – pneumonia, diabetes, heart failure, angina, chronic lung disease and chronic kidney failure – African-American patients were less likely than whites to die in the short term and longer.
On the whole, they were about 25 percent less likely to die within 30 days of entering the hospital and 20 percent less likely to die after six months.
Several past studies, which found whites faring better, attributed the disparity to economic factors, such as greater access to health insurance.
But Dr. Ashish K. Jha said the reverse disparity in his new study is a mystery, because both races have equal access to VA care.
“It was heartening to see that they [blacks] didn’t do any worse, even though we can’t explain why they did better,” Jha, of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco and the University of California at San Francisco, told the Associated Press.