Optimism, resilience may guard heart health in Black adults

Optimism, a sense of purpose and feeling in control are a recipe for better heart health among Black adults, even in neighborhoods where heart disease and stroke are more common, a new study shows.
Researchers looked into how psychosocial well-being, or resilience, affected health. They found that in neighborhoods with high rates of people having or dying from heart disease or stroke, Black adults with higher resilience scores had a 12.5% lower rate of cardiovascular disease than those with lower resilience.
Living in a neighborhood with fewer or limited socioeconomic resources is recognized as a social determinant of health, the conditions in which people are born and live that could impact a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease.
“Almost everything we know about Black Americans and their health focuses on deficits, yet we really need to begin to identify strengths,” one of the study’s principal investigators, Tené T. Lewis, said in