BACKGROUND Social support is an important determinant of health, yet understanding of its contribution to racial disparities in hypertension is limited. Many studies have focused on the relationship between hypertension and social support, or race/ethnicity and social support, but few have examined the inter-relationship between race/ethnicity, social support, and hypertension. The objective of...

OBJECTIVE We aimed to examine insulin clearance, a compensatory mechanism to changes in insulin sensitivity, across sex, race/ethnicity populations, and varying states of glucose tolerance. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We measured insulin sensitivity index (S(I)), acute insulin response (AIR), and metabolic clearance rate of insulin (MCRI) by the frequently sampled intravenous glucose toleranc...

The Hospital Association of Rhode Island, in conjunction with the Rhode Island Cancer Registry, received funding for a special project to improve the validity and reliability of race and ethnicity data in hospital inpatient records. In the past year, five hospitals participated in a pilot to improve race/ethnicity data collection. This paper provides an overview of the design and initial implem...

OBJECTIVE To analyze health care disparities in pediatric quality of care measures and determine the impact of data imputation. DATA SOURCES Five HEDIS measures are calculated based on 2012 administrative data for 145,652 children in two public insurance programs in Florida. METHODS The Bayesian Improved Surname and Geocoding (BISG) imputation method is used to impute missing race and ethni...

This thesis seeks to make visible the presence and voices of minority ethnic households in rural communities by addressing the ‘place blindness’ in research on ethnicity / ‘race’, and the ethnicity / ‘race’ blindness in rural literature. The overall aim of this thesis is to develop an understanding of the lived experiences and perspectives of minority ethnic households and individuals in parts ...

The aim of this paper is to examine the association of individual demographic variables and area characteristics with the characteristics of sexual partners of American adolescents. Data for the study were drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The data indicate that the community characteristics of ethnic or racial composition of the population and region were most st...

OBJECTIVES Measurement of health inequalities based on self-reports may be biased if individuals use response scales in systematically different ways. We use anchoring vignettes to test and adjust for reporting differences by education, race/ethnicity, and gender in self-reported health in 6 domains (pain, sleep, mobility, memory, shortness of breath, and depression). METHOD Using data from t...

Head and neck cancers diagnosed in California are most common among non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks (Figure 3). However, over the past 21 years, both the mortality and incidence rates among all racial/ethnic groups have significantly declined. The largest decrease in incidence has been among non-Hispanic blacks (37.8%), followed by Asian/Pacific Islanders (27.1%). The most notable r...

Tracking quality-of-care measures is essential for improving care, particularly for vulnerable populations. Although managed care plans routinely track quality measures, few examine whether their performance differs by enrollee race/ethnicity or socioeconomic status (SES), in part because plans do not collect that information. We show that plans can begin examining and targeting potential dispa...