WASHINGTON (CBSDC) – Minorities who suffer heart attacks in poor neighborhoods are not nearly as likely to receive proper CPR compared to if they were to suffer from cardiac arrest in affluent white neighborhoods.

A recent study from a group of medical researchers found that blacks and Hispanics are about 30 percent less likely to be aided by CPR than white people, with the odds being the worst when it involves a black victim in a low-income black neighborhood. Comilla Sasson, the study’s lead author from the University of Colorado in Denver, found that socio-economic status actually makes more of a difference in a person surviving than a neighborhood’s racial makeup.

Of the 14,000 cardiac-arrest cases that were examined, the data discovered that those people in poor minority neighborhoods who did receive bystander CPR were twice as likely to survive.

The study, which was published on Oct. 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that little has changed in regard to the rate of people surviving heart attacks in non-hospital settings during the last 30 years. According to The Associated Press, more than 300,000 people suffer heart attacks in non-hospital settings each year, and most of those cases don’t survive.

“We can’t accept that anymore,” Sasson told the AP. “It shouldn’t matter where I drop to have someone help me.”