A Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian study found removing race information from cardiovascular risk calculators did not affect patients' risk scores.
The study, published Dec. 6 in JAMA Cardiology, analyzed atherosclerotic cardiovascular pooled cohort risk scores for 11,639 participants. It found removing race from the equation did not change the score and that adding social determinants of health didn't have an effect.
"The major takeaway is we need to rethink the idea of race in cardiovascular risk prediction," said lead author Arnab Ghosh, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a hospitalist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City. "We need to start thinking about race as a social construct that affects people over the course of their lives, not a biological construct."