Feature Channels: Race and Ethnicity

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Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in the United States, and it affects Hispanic women disproportionately in our region. While Hispanic women tend to have lower incidences of breast cancer compared to non-Hispanic white women, their outcomes differ, leading to higher incidences of mortality. This is due to lower screening rates, limited access to health care, later-stage diagnosis, unique genetic factors and socioeconomic status.

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Polygenic scores – estimates of an individual’s predisposition for complex traits and diseases – hold promise for identifying patients at risk of disease and guiding early, personalized treatments, but UCLA experts found the scores fail to account for the wide range of genetic diversity across individuals in all ancestries.

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The new research findings, published in March in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, used data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA), which recruited about 5,000 healthy young adults from four U.S. cities and followed them for 30 years. The researchers were able to calculate from this data the cumulative effect of individual risk factors, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, elevated cholesterol, and the additive effects of multiple risk factors that can cause cardiovascular disease.

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When Christopher Columbus arrived at the present-day US Virgin Islands on his second voyage across the Atlantic in 1493, the islands were already inhabited – but how and when the islands of St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas were originally populated remains uncertain.

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The Institute for Healing Justice and Equity at Saint Louis University has launched "Critical Futures," a new podcast about imagining alternative futures. The first episode "Reimagining Community Partnerships" explores anti-racist health policies and structural racism in the health care system.

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A new study reveals a staggering disparity in life expectancy between Black Americans and their white counterparts between 1999 and 2020. In an analysis of U.S. data, a Yale-led team of researchers found 1.63 million excess deaths in the Black population compared with white Americans, representing more than 80 million excess years of potential life lost.

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Skin cancer is the most prevalent form of cancer in the United States, with over 5 million cases diagnosed annually. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that melanoma alone accounts for more than 8,000 deaths each year. Thankfully, skin cancer is highly preventable, making it crucial to prioritize protection. Below are some of the latest headlines in the Dermatology channel.

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In a review of the latest research, few stroke studies addressed racist policies, such as residential segregation, or social determinants of health, such as neighborhood deprivation, walkability or security; food availability; economic stability; education quality; or employment and health insurance, all of which play a role in stroke incidence, care and outcomes.

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Mae Jemison, the first woman of color in the world to go into space, will address the graduates at the University of Delaware's Commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 27.

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Title 42, the United States pandemic rule that had been used to immediately deport hundreds of thousands of migrants who crossed the border illegally over the last three years, has expired. Those migrants will have the opportunity to apply for asylum. President Biden's new rules to replace Title 42 are facing legal challenges. Border crossings have already risen sharply, as many migrants attempt to cross before the measure expires on Thursday night. Some have said they worry about tighter controls and uncertainty ahead. Immigration is once again a major focus of the media as we examine the humanitarian, political, and public health issues migrants must go through.

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At TTUHSC El Paso, addressing health disparities remains at the forefront of our mission.

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Physician-scientists from Cedars-Sinai Cancer are available for interviews to discuss the new draft recommendation by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that women at average risk for breast cancer should have a mammogram every other year beginning at age 40.

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Romantic relationships and neighborhood quality are both important predictors of mental and emotional wellbeing. But the larger societal context also influences how these factors affect individuals. A new study from the University of Illinois looks at the intersection of relationships, neighborhood, and mental health for Black Americans.

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May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Get your mental health news here.

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At the 184th ASA Meeting, Yolanda Holt of East Carolina University will describe aspects of the systematic variation between African American English and white American English speech production in children. Holt and her team examined final consonant cluster in 4- and 5-year-olds and using instrumental acoustic phonetic analysis, they discovered that the variation in final consonant production in AAE is likely not a wholesale elimination of word endings but is perhaps a difference in aspects of articulation. Professional understanding of the difference between typical variation and errors is the first step for accurately identifying speech and language disorder.

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With optoacoustic tomography emerging as an effective breast cancer screening method, Seonyeong Park of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and her team wanted to determine its reliability in patients with darker skin. They simulated a range of skin colors and tumor locations using digital breasts to make rapid and cost-effective evaluations, and the results confirmed that tumors could be harder to locate in individuals with darker skin. Park has developed a virtual framework that allows for more comprehensive investigations and can serve as a tool for evaluating and optimizing new OAT imaging systems in their early stages of development.

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Susan G. Komen is pleased to see that the USPSTF has taken into account more recent scientific-based evidence and believes women of average risk should begin breast cancer screening at age 40. However, Komen believes screening should be done every year to catch cancer as early as possible when outcomes are generally better and treatment costs less.

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Women should begin getting regular mammograms to screen for breast cancer at age 40. That is new draft guidance from the United States Preventive Services Task Force.

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New USPSTF Breast Cancer Screening Recommendations are a step in the right direction. However, the American College of Radiology and Society of Breast Imaging urge the USPSTF to go further to recommend annual mammography screening for all average-risk women ages 40 and older.

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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has selected Mariana Byndloss, DVM, PhD, assistant professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, as one of its first Freeman Hrabowski Scholars.

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Black and Hispanic adults at risk of developing cardiovascular disease are less likely to take statin drugs than white adults with the same risk factors, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers reported in JAMA Cardiology.

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In the first analysis of its kind, researchers at the American Cancer Society discovered cancer death rates across all congressional districts in the United States show an overall decline in the past 25 years, with most districts showing a 20%-45% decline among males and a 10%-40% decline among females.

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The CSU recognizes Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Heritage Month.

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Graduate student Amie Fornah Sankoh recently stood in front of 150 colleagues family and friends at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to defend her thesis, Investigating the Effects of Salicylic acid on Intercellular Trafficking via Plasmodesmata in Nicotiana benthamiana. Upon her successful defense, Dr. Amie Sankoh became the first Deaf, Black woman to receive a PhD in any STEM discipline.

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Asian Americans have significant differences in genetics, socioeconomic factors, culture, diet, lifestyle, health interventions and acculturation levels based on the Asian region of their ancestry that likely have unique effects on their risk for heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

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Thyrotoxic periodic paralysis (TPP), a rare neurological condition causing limbs to go limp, may be an underrecognized cause of paralysis in young Hispanic men, a review of data by UT Southwestern Medical Center endocrinologists shows.

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To address the statewide shortage of K-12 credentialed teachers who teach Asian languages, Cal State Fullerton’s College of Education will lead the California State University Asian Language Bilingual Teacher Education Program Consortium.

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The American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. A wealth of data has shown that diversity in the physician workforce improves patient care, safety, physician well-being, and innovation; and fair compensation is essential to culturing a diverse workforce.

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Despite breastfeeding being recommended for at least two years, only 36 percent of all infants are still breastfed at their first birthday. Black/African American mothers are least likely to initiate breastfeeding with initiation rates of only 74 percent compared to 90 percent of Asian mothers with a national average of 84 percent. Given the disparities in breastfeeding initiation, there are likely to be equivalent disparities in breastfeeding duration.

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Maternal Mental Health disorders like postpartum depression affect roughly 600,000 (20%) of U.S. mothers a year, with Black and other women of color experiencing substantial disparities in rates and access to care. It is estimated that up to 50% of mothers are not diagnosed by a health care professional, and that 75% of women never get the treatment they need and that is promised in health care coverage contracts.

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Digestive Disease Week (DDW) is the largest international gathering of physicians, researchers, and academics in the fields of gastroenterology, hepatology, endoscopy, and gastrointestinal surgery. DDW2023 will take place May 6-9 in Chicago and showcase 3,100 abstracts and hundreds of lectures on the latest advances in GI research, clinical practice and technology.

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Susan G. Komen commended the Maryland General Assembly for passing diagnostic and supplemental imaging and Governor Wes Moore for signing it into law. The bill removes a financial barrier to a critical form of screening for some high-risk individuals and an important step in determining the need for a biopsy to rule out or confirm breast cancer.

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New ACR breast cancer screening guidelines urge all women, particularly Black and Ashkenazi Jewish women, to have a risk assessment by age 25 to determine if screening before age 40 is needed. The ACR urges average-risk women to start yearly screening at 40, but earlier screening for high-risk women.

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The Peace Accords Matrix at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies has released a new special report outlining the current implementation status of the gender approach within the 2016 Colombian Peace Accord. The implementation of the gender approach has been fundamental to guaranteeing the protection and promotion of the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people.

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Analyzing crowd-sourced sets of data used to create AI algorithms from medical images, University of Maryland School of Medicine researchers found that most did not include patient demographics and none evaluated for inherent biases. That means they have no way of knowing whether these images contain representative samples of the population such as Blacks, Asians, and Indigenous Americans.