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NIMHD Lauds New Awards on Innovative Health Disparities and Health Equity Research

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NIMHD Lauds New Awards on Innovative Health Disparities and Health Equity Research
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By Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, M.D.
Director, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities

Photo of Dr. Eliseo J. Perez-Stable, NIMHD DirectorWe at the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities are excited and proud to be a part of the Transformative Research to Address Health Disparities and Advance Health Equity initiative, a new effort coordinated by the NIH Common Fund. This new set of 11 grants provides roughly $58 million over five years to support innovative, creative translational health disparities research projects across the country. This new initiative speaks directly to NIMHD’s mission to improve minority health, reduce health disparities, and promote health equity, and encourages bold new solutions to solve enduring problems.

Despite scientific and technological discoveries that have improved the health of the U.S. population overall, racial, and ethnic minority populations, socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, underserved rural populations, and sexual and gender minorities in the U.S. share an unfair burden of diseases such as diabetes, heart and respiratory diseases, HIV, and obesity. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has further underscored how disease can disproportionately affect vulnerable populations the hardest.

In our work, characterizing the drivers of health inequities demands a better understanding of social determinants of health, complex underlying causes of health disparities, and effective interventions specifically designed to reduce disparities in these populations. Continue reading “NIMHD Lauds New Awards on Innovative Health Disparities and Health Equity Research” →

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Storytelling Through Narrative Medicine: Measuring the Lived-Experiences of Black Women’s Reproductive Health

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Storytelling Through Narrative Medicine: Measuring the Lived-Experiences of Black Women’s Reproductive Health
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By Shameka Poetry Thomas, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
NIH Intramural Research Program
Health Disparities Unit
Social and Behavioral Research Branch
National Human Genome Research Institute

Dr. Shameka Poetry Thomas

Dr. Shameka Poetry Thomas

My grandmother was a traditional healer and a medicine-woman in Georgia’s rural South. Although I grew up in Miami’s Opa-Locka (a small urban neighborhood tucked between Miami-Gardens and the cusp of Hialeah / Little Havana), I spent most summers near middle Georgia’s farmland, listening to my grandmother. I observed how grandmother, who did not have a Ph.D., gathered Black women in circles. She described the process of listening to Black women’s pregnancies, births, and wellness experiences as “chitchatting and holding space.”

Learning how to ‘hold space’ is what draws me to narrative medicine. My first dose of learning how to conduct narrative medicine, I suppose, came from my grandmother. This methodology (before I knew it was such) was simply understood as the process of sitting in kitchens and beauty salons in the South—just listening. During childhood, I was merely curious about how Black women described their pregnancies, births, and reproductive health—from their side of the story. Thus, when it came to reproductive health, my grandmother taught me a powerful tool: how to “hold space” for people’s narratives. Continue reading “Storytelling Through Narrative Medicine: Measuring the Lived-Experiences of Black Women’s Reproductive Health” →

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Heartfelt Thanks to the NIMHD Scientific Community in the Time of COVID-19

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NIMHD leadership say thank you
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Co-authored by
Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, M.D.
Director, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities

Monica Webb Hooper, Ph.D.
Deputy Director, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities

NIMHD leadership say thank you

As leaders of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), we want to express our sincerest thanks to the NIMHD scientific community and staff for their efforts as we continue to experience the most challenging public health crisis in over a century. Your rapid-response efforts to document, understand, and address the undue burden of COVID-19 among populations with health disparities—the very groups already dealing with longstanding disparities in life expectancy and overall well-being—have not gone unnoticed. We deeply appreciate your unwavering commitment to research designed to uncover the causes of health disparities, develop interventions to address them, and promote health equity.

Since March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has radically affected us in our daily lives—as individuals, families, and as members of the biomedical research workforce. We have all had to manage unfathomable adjustments and elevated stress both personally and professionally. The pandemic has disproportionately affected the lives and livelihoods of populations that experience health disparities in even more pronounced ways. And these groups—racial and ethnic minority communities, socioeconomically disadvantaged persons, people who live in rural underserved areas and sexual and gender minority persons—are prioritized by NIMHD. Continue reading “Heartfelt Thanks to the NIMHD Scientific Community in the Time of COVID-19” →

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All Health is Local: Measuring the Burden of Disease by U.S. County, Race/Ethnicity, and Socioeconomic Status

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All Health Is Local
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Ali H. Mokdad, Ph.D.
Chief Strategy Officer, Population Health
Professor, Health Metrics Sciences
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
University of Washington, Seattle

Ali Mokdad, Ph.D.

Ali Mokdad, Ph.D.

Despite greater public awareness about the social determinants of health, health inequities in the United States remain severe. Reducing disparities in health outcomes are a persistent challenge for policymakers, public health officials, and medical professionals. Due in part to these gaps, the U.S. underperforms against other industrialized countries in key health metrics, such as overall and healthy life expectancy. The reasons that the U.S. lags behind its peers are manifold. Most importantly, however, are the health discrepancies by geographic location, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (SES). Understanding and reducing disparities among those most affected must be of central interest to policymakers to ensure that every person in the U.S. can lead a healthy life. A dearth of sufficient evidence on local health patterns produced from high-quality scientific research weakens our ability to understand the problem and design interventions. A particularly pressing need is for comprehensive and comparable examination of health outcomes for individuals in the U.S. by race/ethnicity and SES at the local level. Continue reading “All Health is Local: Measuring the Burden of Disease by U.S. County, Race/Ethnicity, and Socioeconomic Status” →

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NIH’s Minority Health and Health Disparities Strategic Plan 2021-2025: A Path to the Future

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NIH’s Minority Health and Health Disparities Strategic Plan

By Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, M.D.
Director, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities

Photo of Dr. Eliseo J. Perez-Stable, NIMHD DirectorThe COVID-19 pandemic has brought minority health and health disparities new attention on the national stage. COVID-19 has disproportionately affected African Americans, American Indians and Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and Latinos and Latinas.

This is a microcosm of the health equity challenge that plagues the U.S.

As in most conditions with health disparities, the causes are complex. People from some of these groups are less likely to have health insurance than Whites. Inequities in access to quality education and limited economic opportunities for many, mean that many minority groups are disproportionately represented among the ranks of essential workers, such as those who work in farms, grocery stores, and support staff in health care settings and long-term care facilities, and less able to avoid the virus at work than people who work in office jobs. Continue reading “NIH’s Minority Health and Health Disparities Strategic Plan 2021-2025: A Path to the Future” →

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National Minority Mental Health Month: Reflections and Resources

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stock image of minorities in counseling circleMental illness does not discriminate, and more than 40 million Americans experience them each year regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, or socioeconomic status. July is National Minority Mental Health Month—a time to raise awareness about the unique psychological struggles that people from racial and ethnic minority communities face.

For National Minority Mental Health Month, NIMHD is sharing reflections and resources about the challenges, stigma, and access to mental health providers minorities often experience. We encourage you to educate yourself, your families, and your communities about mental health and emotional wellbeing. Continue reading “National Minority Mental Health Month: Reflections and Resources” →

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Don’t Forget the Good: Reflections from LGBTQ+ Youth Before and During COVID-19

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Dr. Jeremy Goldbach

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By Jeremy T. Goldbach, Ph.D., LMSW
Associate Professor
Chair, USC Social Behavioral Institutional Review Board
Director, Center for LGBT Health Equity
Pronouns: He/Him
University of Southern California
Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work

I remember it like yesterday. I stepped into the small, cramped meeting room of a local LGBTQ drop-in center. The room served triple duty as a social milieu, computer lab, and meeting room. Posters and homemade art covered the walls, displayed proudly everywhere the eye could see like wallpaper, almost demanding inspiration and hope from passive onlookers. The warm room, paired with the anxiety that no title or position can ever seem to overcome, made my hands clammy. I had arrived seeking feedback on an intervention we had been developing for nearly a decade. Bracing myself for the brutal honesty only found in adolescence, I opened the floor. “So, what do you think?” Continue reading “Don’t Forget the Good: Reflections from LGBTQ+ Youth Before and During COVID-19” →

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The Sweetness of our Ancestors: Thoughts on Diabetes, Genetics, and Ethnic Diversity in Research

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By Larissa Avilés-Santa, M.D., M.P.H.
Director, Clinical and Health Services Research
National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities

Dr. Larissa Avilés-Santa

Dr. Larissa Avilés-Santa

Hurricane season starts on June 1. Tracking of storms that are formed along the Northwestern coast of Africa moving westward, and predictive models of increasing wind force and rain are the norm in every daily news in the Caribbean during this time of the year. Perhaps, the ships that brought our enslaved ancestors from different regions of Africa, and from different parts of Europe, the Middle East and Asia navigated the same routes of these tropical storms. And those may be the same routes that our other ancestors, those who had lived millennia on this side of the globe, navigated when facing seasonal changes in nature, wars and survival in paradise. All those peoples, all those ancestries met and blended In the New World and gave us a rich inheritance of history, traditions, and health.

The indigenous people of my archipelago named my land Borikén – the land of the mighty Lord- where they worshiped the god Yukiyú. Yet, they anticipated the devastation after the almost annual ravages caused by the evil god Juracán, where the name hurricane comes from. Hurricane season brings remote and very recent memories of our fragility and resilience. Hurricane season also brings memories of school days off (¡Qué chévere! Nice!), doing homework under the candle lights and eating canned tuna and soda crackers while waiting for electricity to be restored. It also reminds us that catastrophic events like hurricanes can impact our physical surroundings and our physical health.

Right before the end of the hurricane season comes Thanksgiving, the preamble to our traditionally long Puerto Rican Christmas season: parrandas (impromptu gathering of friends or relatives caroling house to house throughout the night), and of course, preparing and eating food beyond January 6… music, food and drink learned from our ancestors that feed our souls and make our bodies happy…so happy and so sweet. Continue reading “The Sweetness of our Ancestors: Thoughts on Diabetes, Genetics, and Ethnic Diversity in Research” →

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Addiction Should Be Treated, Not Penalized

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Addiction Should Be Treated, Not Penalized
Addiction Should Be Treated, Not Penalized

NOTE:  NIMHD Insights is reposting this op-ed piece with permission from the Health Affairs Blog. It is written by the Director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Dr. Nora D. Volkow, and is available in Spanish on the NIDA website.

By Nora D. Volkow, M.D.
Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse

Photo of Dr. Nora Volkow

Dr. Nora D. Volkow

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the large racial health disparities in the United States. Black Americans have experienced worse outcomes during the pandemic, continue to die at a greater rate than White Americans, and also suffer disproportionately from a wide range of other acute and chronic illnesses. These disparities are particularly stark in the field of substance use and substance use disorders, where entrenched punitive approaches have exacerbated stigma and made it hard to implement appropriate medical care. Abundant data show that Black people and other communities of color have been disproportionately harmed by decades of addressing drug use as a crime rather than as a matter of public health.

We have known for decades that addiction is a medical condition—a treatable brain disorder—not a character flaw or a form of social deviance. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence supporting that position, drug addiction continues to be criminalized. The U.S. must take a public health approach to drug addiction now, in the interest of both population well-being and health equity. Continue reading “Addiction Should Be Treated, Not Penalized” →

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Other Impacts of COVID-19: Anti-Asian Hate

Posted on by NIMHD
#stopasianhate

By Gilbert C. Gee, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences
UCLA Fielding School of Public Health
University of California, Los Angeles

Photo of Dr, Gilbert C. Ge

Dr. Gilbert C. Ge

The rise of COVID-19 coincided with a rise in reports about anti-Asian hate incidents in the U.S. and around the world in 2020. Analyses of social media data showed a massive 17,000% increase in negative sentiment against Asians that correlated with our former president’s infamous use of the phrase “China virus” in March of 2020, which directly contradicted calls by public health officials to use neutral terms such as “COVID-19.” 1 Other research confirms these trends2. Continue reading “Other Impacts of COVID-19: Anti-Asian Hate” →

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