Health Disparities

In support of its commitment to fighting health inequities, Vanderbilt University School of Nursing has launched an ambitious campaign to raise and match $1 million to support health disparity research. Dean Pamela Jeffries recently announced the school’s Nursing Health Equity Fellowship program, setting aside $1 million for health equity research at the school and asking VUSN supporters to make a 1:1 philanthropic match to fund this critical research. Read More

Vanderbilt epidemiologists conducted in-depth whole genome sequencing of breast cancer risk genes in Black women, who die at higher rates and have more aggressive disease, to discover mutations that may improve testing and treatment selection. Read More

Hospital data from a CDC network that monitors influenza revealed that adults hospitalized for COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic were 20x more likely to die compared to hospitalized influenza patients. Read More

Unique somatic gene mutations may contribute to racial disparities in the incidence of Wilms tumor — the most common childhood kidney cancer. Read More

Variation in the levels of hormones called natriuretic peptides may contribute to racial differences in susceptibility to diabetes, suggesting that this hormone system may be a target for reducing risk of the disease. Read More

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) guidelines that determine which smokers qualify for CT scans are excluding significant numbers of African Americans who develop lung cancer, a health disparity that merits modifications to lung cancer screening criteria, according to a study from Vanderbilt researchers. Read More

One of the first studies to examine the health impacts of legal marriage for LGBT individuals has found gay men were more likely to receive routine medical care following marriage legalization. Read More

Boys and men of color or who identify as LGBTQI experience higher rates of trauma, substance use, depression and violence, and that worsens their overall health, according to a new report coauthored by Derek Griffith, who is part of the American Psychological Association’s Working Group on Health Disparities in Boys and Men. Read More

New research by Vanderbilt nephrologists highlights potential barriers that may prevent black Americans from being screened for kidney disease. Read More

A trans-institutional team of Vanderbilt social scientists and medical professionals will look at how laws affecting LGBT individuals and families affect their health and the economy. Read More

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), the University of Miami and Meharry Medical College were recently awarded a five-year, $11.6 million grant to launch a new center that will enable research using precision medicine to eradicate health disparities, specifically those among African-Americans and Latinos. Read More

Melody Goodman, Ph.D., M.S., assistant professor of Public Health Sciences in the Department of Surgery at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, visited the Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance recently to present a lecture titled “Increasing Community Capacity to Partner in Health Disparities Research.” Read More

Health disparities between white and black adults in the South are not connected to a lack of exercise but more likely related to other factors such as access to health care, socioeconomic status and perhaps genetics, according to a Vanderbilt study published in PLoS ONE. Read More

George C. Hill, Ph.D., professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, Medical Education and Administration, Emeritus, has been asked to become an inaugural member of a national group of scholars that will work to address health disparities through research and mentoring. Read More