Racial disparities in heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes death rates have minimally improved over last two decades
Black adults in rural areas have high mortality rates from high blood pressure, diabetes, but improvement seen in stroke outcomes, urban areas
2021-03-15
(Press-News.org) In the last 20 years, Black adults living in rural areas of the United States experienced high mortality rates due to diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke compared to white adults. According to a research letter published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, racial disparities improved minimally in rural areas over the last two decades, with larger improvements occurring in urban areas.
"While modest gains have been made in reducing racial health inequities in urban areas, large gaps in death rates between Black and white adults persist in rural areas, particularly for diabetes and hypertension. We haven't meaningfully narrowed the racial gap in outcomes for these conditions in rural areas over the last two decades," said Rishi Wadhera, MD, MPP, MPhil, cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and senior author of the study. "Given that diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease are preventable and treatable, targeted public health and policy efforts are needed to address structural inequities that contribute to racial disparities in rural health."
Using data from the CDC Wonder Database, researchers assessed age-adjusted mortality rates for Black and white adults 25 years and older, stratified by rural or urban area from 1999 to 2018. They then determined if disparities in Black vs. white mortality rates for each condition--diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke--changed in rural areas compared to urban areas during the timeframe.
Over the last two decades, mortality rates from each condition have been highest among Black adults living in rural areas--diabetes and high blood pressure-related mortality are two to three times higher for Black adults compared to white adults. Over the entire study period, the researchers found mortality rates in rural and urban areas were higher for Black adults compared to white adults for all conditions. However, between 1999 and 2018 the gap in mortality rates between Black vs. white adults narrowed more rapidly in urban areas for diabetes and high blood pressure compared to those in rural areas. In contrast, racial disparities narrowed for heart disease and stroke mortality for rural Black adults.
According to the researchers, the persistent racial disparities for diabetes and high blood pressure-related mortality in rural areas may reflect structural inequities that impede access to primary, preventative and specialist care for rural Black adults. However, the modest improvement in racial disparities for heart disease and stroke mortality in rural areas may reflect improvements in emergency services, the expansion of referral networks, the development of stroke and myocardial infarction care centers, and the implementation of time to procedure metrics such as door-to-balloon.
INFORMATION:
In 2020 the ACC formed a Board of Trustees Task Force on Health Equity, which is charged with coordinating an ACC-wide approach to improving equity for patients and populations, including access to care, addressing systemic racism and exploring social determinants of health. END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-03-15
March 15, 2021 - After arthroscopic surgery on the meniscus of the knee, patients using telemedicine for postoperative follow-up are just as satisfied with their care as those making in-person visits, reports a study in The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio in partnership with Wolters Kluwer.
"Patient satisfaction with overall care is equivalent between telemedicine and office-based follow-up after an arthroscopic meniscal surgical procedure in the immediate postoperative period," according to the randomized trial report by Christina P. Herrero, MD, and colleagues of NYU Langone Health, New York , and colleagues.
Telemedicine is 'a reasonable alternative' for postoperative visits
The ...
2021-03-15
Immigrants imprisoned in immigration facilities across the country face health conditions and often have chronic illnesses that would expose them to greater risk with COVID-19, a new University of California, Davis, study suggests.
"The research is clear: immigration detention is not only unnecessary for facilitating a just immigration system, but also causes extensive harm to detained people, perhaps especially to those facing chronic health conditions," said the study's lead author, Caitlin Patler, professor of sociology. "This is particularly alarming in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The government must act quickly to permanently reduce reliance ...
2021-03-15
Prior to COVID-19, communication via the internet was already a regular feature of everyday interactions for most people, including those on the autism spectrum. Various studies have shown how autistic people use information and communication technology (ICT) since the early 2000s, some finding that autistic people may prefer to communicate using the internet instead of in-person. However, no systematic review has been conducted to summarize these findings.
To understand what has been discovered so far, researchers from Drexel University's A.J. Drexel Autism Institute collected and reviewed published research about how autistic youth and adults use the internet to communicate and provide a framework ...
2021-03-15
(BOSTON) ¬-- Trillions of commensal microbes live on the mucosal and epidermal surfaces of the body and it is firmly established that this microbiome affects its host's tolerance and sensitivity of the host to a variety of pathogens. However, host tolerance to infection with pathogens is not equally developed in all organisms. For example, it is known that the gut microbiome of mice protects more effectively against infection with certain pathogens, such as the bacterium Salmonella typhimurium, than the human gut microbiome.
This raises the interesting possibility that analyzing differences between host-microbiome ...
2021-03-15
TORONTO, ON - Research by a team of chemists at the University of Toronto, led by Nobel Prize-winning researcher John Polanyi, is shedding new light on the behaviour of molecules as they collide and exchange atoms during chemical reaction. The discovery casts doubt on a 90-year old theoretical model of the behavior of the "transition state", intermediate between reagents and products in chemical reactions, opening a new area of research.
The researchers studied collisions obtained by launching a fluorine atom at the centre of a fluoromethyl molecule - made up of one carbon atom and three fluorine atoms - and observed the resulting reaction using Scanning Tunneling Microscopy. What they saw following each collision ...
2021-03-15
Fingerprints may be more useful to us than helping us nab criminal suspects: they also improve our sense of touch. Sensory neurons in the finger can detect touch on the scale of a single fingerprint ridge, according to new research published in JNeurosci.
The hand contains tens of thousands of sensory neurons. Each neuron tunes in to a small surface area on the skin -- a receptive field -- and detects touch, vibration, pressure, and other tactile stimuli. The human hand possesses a refined sense of touch, but the exact sensitivity of a single sensory neuron has not been studied before.
To ...
2021-03-15
Key Points
19.3% of children and adolescents in the United States have obesity and therefore have a higher likelihood of having obesity as adults and developing weight-related diseases.
This AJCN study assessed how strongly mothers' diets during pregnancy were associated with their children's growth rates during specific periods from birth through adolescence.
Study results suggest maternal nutrition during pregnancy may influence her offspring's weight gain during specific periods from birth to adolescence.
A pregnancy diet with higher inflammatory potential was associated with accelerated BMI growth trajectories in children, specifically those between three and ten years of age.
Rockville, ...
2021-03-15
Recent summer droughts in Europe are far more severe than anything in the past 2,100 years, according to a new study.
An international team, led by the University of Cambridge, studied the chemical fingerprints in European oak trees to reconstruct summer climate over 2,110 years. They found that after a long-term drying trend, drought conditions since 2015 suddenly intensified, beyond anything in the past two thousand years.
This anomaly is likely the result of human-caused climate change and associated shifts in the jet stream. The results are reported in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Recent summer droughts and heatwaves in Europe have had devastating ecological and economic consequences, which will worsen as the global climate continues to warm.
"We're ...
2021-03-15
In their study, which is now published in the journal Nature Aging, they show that the level of non-coding RNAs in the blood of a Parkinson's patient can be used to track the course of the disease. For their study, the team led by bioinformatics professor Andreas Keller and his doctoral student Fabian Kern created and analyzed the molecular profiles of more than 5,000 blood samples from over 1,600 Parkinson's patients. This resulted in around 320 billion data points, which the researchers analyzed for biomarkers of Parkinson's disease using artificial intelligence methods. ...
2021-03-15
DURHAM, N.C. -- Researchers at Duke University have revealed long-hidden molecular dynamics that provide desirable properties for solar energy and heat energy applications to an exciting class of materials called halide perovskites.
A key contributor to how these materials create and transport electricity literally hinges on the way their atomic lattice twists and turns in a hinge-like fashion. The results will help materials scientists in their quest to tailor the chemical recipes of these materials for a wide range of applications in an environmentally friendly way.
The results appear online March 15 in the journal Nature Materials.
"There is a broad ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Racial disparities in heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes death rates have minimally improved over last two decades
Black adults in rural areas have high mortality rates from high blood pressure, diabetes, but improvement seen in stroke outcomes, urban areas
