EthnicMajority

(CNN) —The latest report on cancer among African-Americans shows a good-news, bad-news scenario. While racial gaps are closing for some types of cancers, including fewer cancer deaths among African-American men, disparities are increasing for some cancers that can be found through routine screenings.

The report

Every year, the American Cancer Society reports on the latest data, based on reports from the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries. The newest information includes data for the year 2009. This year's report is published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

The results

The latest data show that the cancer death rate declined faster for African-American men than among white men during the latest time period. African-American men experienced a drop of 2.4 percent annually, compared with 1.7 percent among white men. That means the prevention of nearly 200,000 cancer deaths among African-Americans since the 1990s, according to the report.

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(Futurity.org) For a study published online in American Journal of Public Health, pediatricians responded to case scenarios involving medical treatments for white and African American patients for four common pediatric conditions. Those doctors who show an implicit preference for European-Americans tended to prescribe better pain-management for white patients than for African American patients.

“We’re talking about subtle, unconscious attitudes that are pervasive in society. Because these are unconscious attitudes, doctors aren’t aware that their racial attitudes may affect their treatment decisions,” says Janice Sabin, a research assistant professor in the department of biomedical informatics and medical education at the University of Washington.

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(Boston Herald) African-American senior citizens are significantly less likely than whites to be diagnosed and treated for depression, a Rutgers University study concluded.

Researchers reviewed five years of national data from the U.S. Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, looking at the financial, insurance and health-care use information of 33,708 beneficiaries from 2001 to 2005.

The Rutgers study, to appear in the February edition of the American Journal of Public Health, found that depression diagnosis rates were 6.4 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 4.2 percent for African-Americans.

Researchers believe that many African-Americans are depressed but aren’t getting the diagnosis or help they need, said Ayse Akincigil, lead researcher and an assistant professor at Rutgers School of Social Work.

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(Huffington Post) Latinos suffer from wide ranging health disparities in comparison to non-Hispanic whites. They are twice as likely, for example, as non-Hispanics of the same age, to have diabetes and to develop complications from diabetes such as heart disease, high blood pressure, blindness, kidney disease, amputations and nerve damage. While we know these disparities are caused by a combination of environmental and genetic factors, we don't know to what degree each are involved for many conditions disproportionately affecting Latinos. That's where modern genomics comes into play.

With the Human Genome Project complete for over a decade, the benefits of genomic data
are now trickling into the business and practice of medicine. The passage of the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act in 2008 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010 have set the rules of the road, and made the critical investments necessary to lay the ground work for new advances in American genomics research. In the coming years, as the price of whole-genome scans come down and the medical community enters a new era of personalized medicine, we will have a new set of tools with which to study the origin of diseases affecting specific populations.

Genetics can reveal useful information about an individual's health status, but they can also reveal unexpected information about group identity. The Latino community is both genetically and culturally diverse; and as gene-based medicine advances, Latinos will need to make sure that new medical technologies serve that diversity.

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(Huffington Post) People have long known that health in the U.S. is not an equal thing. But now, thanks to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there are numbers to prove it.

The first-ever “Health Disparites and Inequalities Report” shows startling differences in things like national mortality rates, behavioral risk factors and access to health care across various economic and racial groups in the U.S. According to the CDC, the goal is to now use the compiled data as benchmark for future progress. Additionally, by quantifying and highlighting major health disparities, the CDC hopes to inspire action and “facilitate accountability.”

Some of the starkest findings of the report center around the dramatic disparities between high- and low-income Americans. Low-income residents report up to 11 fewer “healthy” days per month than their high-income counterparts. Also notable: Preventable hospitilzation rates increase greatly as income decreases.

If there were no disparities in this area, the CDC estimates that the U.S. would save $6.7 billion in health care costs every year.

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