Todd bowen, a 42-year-old father of seven, has been visiting the In the Cut barbershop in Inglewood, Calif., every two weeks for seven years. He likes to look good, but he never expected his ton-sorial routine to save his life. In February, Bowen arrived at the shop to find not only his barbers, but also a doctor doing on-the-spot testing for hypertension and diabetes. Bowen, who is uninsured, had never been tested for either; that day he tested positive for both, with a blood-pressure reading of 160/89. "I was all shaken up when I saw where I was on the scale and where I was supposed to be," Bowen says. "I thought I was invincible, immune. If they wouldn't have been there, I wouldn't have gotten tested. I wouldn't have went out of my way. It was God's will for that to happen to me."Undiagnosed and untreated, Bowen was at elevated risk of developing heart failure, which increasing numbers of African-American men and women are suffering at earlierand earlier ages. A study last month in The New England Journal of Medicine found that blacks under age 50 experience heart failure at 20 times the rate of whites. "To see dais among people in their 30s and 40s was really quite striking to us," says Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, codirector ofthe UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations at San Francisco General Hospital, and the study's lead author. Because their weakened heart muscles can't pump enough blood, people with heart failure are often too weak to work. "It's a devastating illness whenever it happens. It comes with such a high degree of disability, it could be devastating to whole communities."
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