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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    Nutrition in minority elders: current problems and future directions.
    (1996) Buchowski, M S; Sun, M
    Nutrition and aging are inseparably connected as eating patterns affect the progress of many degenerative diseases associated with aging. In turn, the nutritional status of the elderly, particularly minority elders (the most rapidly growing segment of the population in the United States), may be adversely affected by a number of factors associated either directly or indirectly with aging. Because reducing morbidity through health promotion and disease prevention could both improve the quality of elderly life and lessen the burden on the health care system, it would seem reasonable that such efforts, including nutrition education, in minority elderly would be of benefit. The extent of the potential value of such preventive programs, however, remains uncertain, and the task of determining nutrient needs of the elderly difficult. Special studies are required to describe the association of nutrition-related factors with chronic diseases, particularly those prevalent in minority elders.
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    Participation in Cancer Clinical Trials: Race-, Sex-, and Age-Based Disparities
    (2004) Murthy, Vivek H.; Krumholz, Harlan M.; Gross, Cary P.
    Context Despite the importance of diversity of cancer trial participants with regard to race, ethnicity, age, and sex, there is little recent information about the representation of these groups in clinical trials. Objective To characterize the representation of racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and women in cancer trials sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. Design, Setting, and Patients Cross-sectional population-based analysis of all participants in therapeutic nonsurgical National Cancer Institute Clinical Trial Cooperative Group breast, colorectal, lung, and prostate cancer clinical trials in 2000 through 2002. In a separate analysis, the ethnic distribution of patients enrolled in 2000 through 2002 was compared with those enrolled in 1996 through 1998, using logistic regression models to estimate the relative risk ratio of enrollment for racial and ethnic minorities to that of white patients during these time periods. Main Outcome Measure Enrollment fraction, defined as the number of trial enrollees divided by the estimated US cancer cases in each race and age subgroup. Results Cancer research participation varied significantly across racial/ethnic and age groups. Compared with a 1.8% enrollment fraction among white patients, lower enrollment fractions were noted in Hispanic (1.3%; odds ratio [OR] vs whites, 0.72; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.68-0.77; P<.001) and black (1.3%; OR, 0.71; 95% CI, 0.68-0.74; P<.001) patients. There was a strong relationship between age and enrollment fraction, with trial participants 30 to 64 years of age representing 3.0% of incident cancer patients in that age group, in comparison to 1.3% of 65- to 74-year-old patients and 0.5% of patients 75 years of age and older. This inverse relationship between age and trial enrollment fraction was consistent across racial and ethnic groups. Although the total number of trial participants increased during our study period, the representation of racial and ethnic minorities decreased. In comparison to whites, after adjusting for age, cancer type, and sex, patients enrolled in 2000 through 2002 were 24% less likely to be black (adjusted relative risk ratio, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.65-0.89; P<.001). Men were more likely than women to enroll in colorectal cancer trials (enrollment fractions: 2.1% vs 1.6%, respectively; OR, 1.30; 95% CI, 1.24-1.35; P<.001) and lung cancer trials (enrollment fractions: 0.9% vs 0.7%, respectively; OR, 1.23; 95% CI, 1.16-1.31; P<.001). Conclusions Enrollment in cancer trials is low for all patient groups. Racial and ethnic minorities, women, and the elderly were less likely to enroll in cooperative group cancer trials than were whites, men, and younger patients, respectively. The proportion of trial participants who are black has declined in recent years.
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    Racial Trends in the Use of Major Procedures among the elderly.
    (2005) Jha, Ashish
    BACKGROUND: Differences in the use of major procedures according to patients' race are well known. Whether national and local initiatives to reduce these differences have been successful is unknown. METHODS: We examined data for men and women enrolled in Medicare from 1992 through 2001 on annual age-standardized rates of receipt of nine surgical procedures previously shown to have disparities in the rates at which they were performed in black patients and in white patients. We also examined data according to hospital-referral region for three of the nine procedures: coronary-artery bypass grafting (CABG), carotid endarterectomy, and total hip replacement. RESULTS: Nationally, in 1992, the rates of receipt for all the procedures examined were higher among white patients than among black patients. The difference between the rates among whites and blacks increased significantly between 1992 and 2001 for five of the nine procedures, remained unchanged for three procedures, and narrowed significantly for one procedure. We examined rates of CABG, carotid endarterectomy, and total hip replacement in 158 hospital-referral regions (79 hospital-referral regions for black men and white men and 79 for black women and white women) with an adequate number of persons for each procedure. We found that in the early 1990s, whites had higher rates for these procedures than blacks in every hospital-referral region. By 2001, the difference between whites and blacks (both men and women) in the rates of these procedures narrowed significantly in 22 hospital-referral regions, widened significantly in 42, and were not significantly changed in the remaining hospital-referral regions. At the end of the study period, we found no hospital-referral region in which the difference in rates between whites and blacks was eliminated for men or women with regard to any of these three procedures. CONCLUSIONS: For the decade of the 1990s, we found no evidence, either nationally or locally, that efforts to eliminate racial disparities in the use of high-cost surgical procedures were successful.