When you hear that Mississippi is a red state, you think politics, but red also applies to the toll of its cardiovascular disease. Look at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s map of the death rates from heart disease down to the county level across the U.S. Colors range from a healthy pale pink to deep red — those areas are the sickest. Mississippi is bathed almost entirely in crimson. Among Americans 35 and older, Mississippians have the highest mortality from heart disease in the nation, ranging between 450 and 850 deaths per 100,000.
By no coincidence, this state also has the greatest portion of African-American residents, close to 40 percent of the total population. Ervin Fox, a Harvard-trained cardiologist and epidemiologist, knows these statistics from multiple perspectives. Fox, 49, grew up in the Mississippi Delta region, where the soil is rich and cotton was king.
He treats patients at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) in Jackson, and he also does research for the Jackson Heart Study, the African-American version of the older, more famous ongoing Framingham Heart Study. Since 1948, thanks to thousands of health histories collected from the mainly white residents of Framingham, Mass., epidemiologists have learned how blood pressure, smoking habits, cholesterol and a few other quantifiable factors can forecast heart disease and stroke, two general conditions comprising cardiovascular disease (CVD). The Jackson study, starting in 2000, was meant to determine if the same variables applied in the same way to black people.
