Preventive health screenings are important for everyone, yet these simple and routine things are not readily available to some. Nothing in life is perfect, medicine included. The healthcare system has not figured out a way to screen for every illness or cancer, but it does offer great screening tools for some. Things like pap smears, mammograms, colon cancer screenings and vaccines save lives every day.
African Americans have a greater risk of developing certain chronic health conditions compared to the rest of the U.S. population. This includes heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and stroke.
The American Academy of Family Medicine Physicians refers to factors that influence a person's health outcomes as social determinants of health. These are the conditions under which people are born, grow, live and work.
Some factors disproportionately affect the health outcomes of African Americans.
A significant reason for health disparities is unequal access to health screenings and preventive measures. Making appointments for routine screenings requires reliable transportation, health insurance, health literacy, time off from work and family support.
Patients are less likely to seek preventive care if they don't have transportation, child care, the ability to pay or health insurance. Unfortunately, African Americans are at an increased risk for these social determinants of health that negatively affect their ability to seek care.
For decades in the medical community, the calculation for kidney function included race. The glomerular filtration rate is an estimate of kidney function (called eGFR) based on several calculations, including age, sex, body weight, etc. The original clinical trials that developed the formulas for eGFR assumed that race was biologic.
Historically, the formulas include a Black race variable which increased eGFR values for this population and overestimated kidney function by up to 16%. This led to delays in African Americans receiving kidney disease diagnoses, referrals to dialysis care and eligibility for kidney transplants.
