Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769

Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

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Author: search.filters.author.Briggs, Nathaniel C.Subject: search.filters.subject.African Americans

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    Occupational Risk Factors for Selected Cancers Among African American and White Men in the United States
    (2003) Briggs, Nathaniel C.; Levine, Robert S.; Hall, H. Irene; Cosby, Otis; Brann, Edward A.; Hennekens, Charles H.
    Objectives. This study examined occupational risks for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease, and soft-tissue sarcoma among African American and White men. Methods. Race-specific multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted using data from a large US population-based case–control study. Results. Significant occupational risks were limited to African Americans; chromium was associated with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (odds ratio [OR] = 3.9, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.2, 12.9) and wood dust was associated with Hodgkin’s disease (OR = 4.6, 95% CI = 1.6, 13.3) and soft-tissue sarcoma (OR = 3.7, 95% CI = 1.6, 8.6). Conclusions. Race-specific occupational risk factors for cancer were evident only among African American men. This may reflect racial disparities in levels of exposure to occupational carcinogens.
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    Black-White Inequalities in Mortality and Life Expectancy, 1933–1999: Implications for Healthy People 2010
    (2001) Levine, Robert S.; Foster, James E.; Fullilove, Robert E.; Fullilove, Mindy T.; Briggs, Nathaniel C.; Hull, Pamela C.; Husaini, Baqar A.; Hennekens, Charles H.
    Objectives. Optimistic predictions for the Healthy People 2010 goals of eliminating racial/ethnic disparities in health have been made based on absolute improvements in life expectancy and mortality. This study sought to determine whether there is evidence of relative improvement (a more valid measure of inequality) in life expectancy and mortality, and whether such improvement, if demonstrated, predicts future success in eliminating disparities. Methods. Historical data from the National Center for Health Statistics and the Census Bureau were used to predict future trends in relative mortality and life expectancy, employing an Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model. Excess mortality and time lags in mortality and life expectancy for blacks relative to whites were also estimated. Results. Based on data for 1945 to 1999, forecasts for relative black:white ageadjusted, all-cause mortality and white:black life expectancy at birth showed trends toward increasing disparities. From 1979, when the Healthy People initiative began, to 1998, the black:white ratio of age-adjusted, gender specific mortality increased for all but one of nine causes of death that accounted for 83.4% of all US mortality in 1998. From 1980 to 1998, average numbers of excess deaths per day among American blacks relative to whites increased by 20%. American blacks experienced 4.3 to 4.5 million premature deaths relative to whites in 1940–1999. Conclusions. The rationale that underlies the optimistic Healthy People 2010 forecasts, that future success can be built on a foundation of past success, is not supported when relative measures of inequality are used. There has been no sustained decrease in blackwhite inequalities in age-adjusted mortality or life expectancy at birth at the national level since 1945. Without fundamental changes, most probably related to the ways medical and public health practitioners are trained, evaluated, and compensated for prevention- related activities, as well as further research on translating the findings of prevention studies into clinical practice, it is likely that simply reducing disparities in access to care and/or medical treatment will be insufficient. Millions of premature deaths will continue to occur among African Americans.