OBJECTIVE To investigate the association between 2 lysyl oxidase-like 1 (LOXL1) polymorphisms, rs1048661 (R141L) and rs3825942 (G153D), and exfoliation syndrome (XFS) in black South African individuals. METHODS A total of 43 black patients with XFS and 47 ethnically matched controls were recruited for genetic analysis. Samples were analyzed for presence of the LOXL1-R141L and G153D variants u...

BACKGROUND Hypertension in sub-Saharan Africa is a widespread problem of immense economic importance because of its high prevalence in urban areas, its frequent underdiagnosis, and the severity of its complications. METHODS AND RESULTS We searched PubMed and relevant journals for words in the title of this article. Among the major problems in making headway toward better detection and treatme...

Adrian mole lives in multicultural, multi-faith post-colonial Britain, a Britain in which diversity in all its various shapes and forms is almost taken for granted. However, his confrontation with the possibility of prostate cancer reinforces what we know about White men’s relationship to serious illness in general and to prostate cancer in particular. We know prostate cancer is the most common...

BACKGROUND Cancer incidence typically increases with age, but it is not known whether ethnic characteristics influence the age dependence of squamous cell carcinoma of the skin (SCC). OBJECTIVES (i) To determine the age dependence of SCC in the black African, coloured and white population groups of South Africa (SA); and (ii) to show whether any differences in the rate of change of age depend...

Race matters, influencing life experiences. Race is not a simple concept, and it is not a single category. Racial identity theories , however, typically handle race as a simple Black-White dichotomy that overlooks within-group heterogeneity, substituting a subgroup—young, low socioeconomic status, darker skinned men—for all African Americans. The centrality of this subgroup image reifies what i...

African Americans show unusually high endorsement rates on self-report measures of contamination anxiety. The purpose of this study was to replicate this finding in a nationally representative sample and conduct a randomized experiment to determine the effect of salience of race as a causal factor. Black and White participants were given contamination items from two popular measures of obsessiv...

BACKGROUND Individuals of black African ethnicity tend to have less visceral adipose tissue (VAT) but more subcutaneous-abdominal adipose tissue (SCAT) than white Caucasians. However, it is unclear whether such distribution of abdominal fat is beneficial for metabolic disease risk in black individuals. Here we compared the associations between these specific abdominal fat depots, insulin sensit...