Study Shows CPR Less Likely in Poor, Black Neighborhoods

A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that people who suffer cardiac arrest in white, wealthy neighborhoods are two times as likely to receive CPR than those who reside in black, low-income neighborhoods.

"If you drop in a neighborhood that is 80 percent white with a median income over $40,000 a year, you have a 55 percent chance of getting CPR. If you drop in a poor, black neighborhood you have a 35 percent chance," says the study's author Dr. Comilla Sasson, an emergency room physician at the University of Colorado Hospital.

She found a direct relationship between neighborhood race and income in whether a bystander will administer life-saving CPR. One living in a low-income African American neighbor is 50 percent less likely to receive CPR than if they reside in a high-income, non-Black neighborhood. 

Neighborhoods aside, Latinos and Blacks are 30 percent less likely than their white counterparts to receive CPR from a bystander. 


Read more about the study here.