CONTEXT Health disparities are among the critical public health challenges. OBJECTIVES To analyze the extent to which local health departments (LHDs) perform activities for addressing health disparities, changes in proportion of LHDs' performing those activities since 2005, and factors associated with variation in such engagement. METHODS We used the 2013 National Profile of LHDs Survey to ...

Regular physical activity is important for health benefits among youth, but disparities exist. This paper describes disparities in physical activity participation and sedentary behaviors among youth in the United States, provides intervention implications, and offers recommendations for future research focused on reducing disparities related to levels of physical activity. Secondary analysis of...

BACKGROUND Although public release of quality information through report cards is intended to improve health care, there may be unintended consequences of report cards, such as physicians avoiding high-risk patients to improve their ratings. If physicians believe that racial and ethnic minorities are at higher risk for poor outcomes, report cards could worsen existing racial and ethnic disparit...

OBJECTIVES To review the extent of health disparities in gynecologic cancer care and outcomes and to propose recommendations to help counteract the disparities. METHODS We searched the electronic databases PubMed and the Cochrane Library. We included studies demonstrating quantifiable differences by race and ethnicity in the incidence, treatment, and survival of gynecologic cancers in the Uni...

This paper compares black-white health disparities among state prisoners to disparities in the noninstitutionalized community to provide a more complete portrait of the nation's heath. We use data from the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities and the 2002 and 2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for incarcerated and noninstitutionalized adult (age...

The visual system utilizes binocular disparity to discriminate the relative depth of objects in space. Since the striate cortex is the first site along the central visual pathways at which signals from the left and right eyes converge onto a single neuron, encoding of binocular disparity is thought to begin in this region. There are two possible mechanisms for encoding binocular disparity throu...

OBJECTIVE To assess health care disparities among black and Latino adults with schizophrenia receiving services during the period July 1994-June 2006, and to evaluate trends in observed disparities. DATA SOURCES Administrative claims data from the Florida Medicaid program. Data sources included membership files (demographic information), medical claims (diagnostic, service, and expenditure in...

CONTEXT A disaster is indiscriminate in whom it affects. Limited research has shown that the poor and medically underserved, especially in rural areas, bear an inequitable amount of the burden. OBJECTIVE To review the literature on the combined effects of a disaster and living in an area with existing health or health care disparities on a community's health, access to health resources, and q...

Objectives: Racial/ethnic disparities in nursing homes (NHs) are associated with lower quality of care, and state Medicaid payment policies may influence NH quality. However, no studies analyzing disparities in NH quality of life (QoL) exist. Therefore, this study aims to estimate associations at the NH level between average number of QoL deficiencies and concentrations of racial/ethnic minorit...

OBJECTIVE Initiatives to monitor progress in health interventions like sanitation are increasingly focused on disparities in access. We explored three methodological challenges to monitoring changes in sanitation coverage across socio-economic and demographic determinants: (i) confounding by wealth indices including water and sanitation assets, (ii) use of individual urban and rural settings ve...