Race and Responsiveness to Drugs for Heart Failure

To the Editor: As Wood (May 3 issue) 1 points out, individual and racial differences in the responses to drugs are increasingly often shown to reflect, at least in part, varying distributions of polymorphisms in drug receptors or drug-metabolizing enzymes among different populations. In several instances, a lesser response was found in nonwhite patients than in white patients to such drugs as the angiotensin-converting–enzyme (ACE) inhibitor enalapril, as reported by Exner et al. (May 3 issue), 2 and the beta-blocker bucindolol. 3 These findings are valuable for guiding clinical practice. From another perspective, it would be interesting to examine to what extent the . . .