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Dear Closing the Health Gap Community:
Thanksgiving holds special relevance in our community as a time for togetherness, gratitude, and honoring traditions that celebrate resilience and unity. It's more than a holiday—it’s an opportunity to reflect on the importance of caring for ourselves and our loved ones. By prioritizing physical, mental, and emotional well-being, we can create a positive culture of health that strengthens our families and communities. Whether it's sharing nutritious meals, connecting with elders, or supporting one another, Thanksgiving reminds us to invest in our collective health and ensure that gratitude fuels a legacy of care, love, and wellness for generations to come.
Have a safe and blessed holiday week ahead!
Renee Mahaffey Harris
President & CEO
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Take the Type 2 Diabetes Risk Test
Learning your risk is the first step in taking action against diabetes. Discover your risk today and receive next steps in your health journey—including if you qualify to join a local National Diabetes Prevention Program (National DPP) that is proven to lower your risk for type 2 diabetes. If you have Medicare, you may be able to participate at no cost!
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Understanding Racial Disparities in Drug Overdose Deaths
Drug overdose deaths vary widely across racial and ethnic groups in the United States. The rates are higher in some communities due to unequal healthcare access, socioeconomic barriers, and systemic biases. Drug overdose by race shows alarming disparities, with some communities in the United States facing significantly higher risks. Some scientific evidence shows that American Indian, Alaska Native, and Black communities face the highest overdose rates. These disparities point to complex factors, including healthcare access, socioeconomic barriers, and systemic racism.
Click here for the full story.
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U.S. Surgeon General Releases New Report: Eliminating Tobacco-Related Disease and Death, Addressing Health Disparities
The Surgeon General released a new report on health disparities related to tobacco use, which finds that despite the nation’s substantial progress in reducing cigarette smoking and secondhand smoke exposure in the overall U.S. population, that progress has not been equal for all population groups. Disparities in tobacco use persist by race and ethnicity, income, education, sexual orientation and gender identity, occupation, geography, behavioral health status, and other factors. Additionally, cigarette smoking and secondhand smoke exposure continue to cause nearly half a million deaths a year in the United States—nearly one in five of all deaths.
This report expands upon the 1998 Surgeon General’s report on tobacco use among U.S. racial and ethnic groups to include data and trends by additional demographic factors and their intersection. This report also summarizes research on factors that influence tobacco-related disparities, and outlines actions everyone can take to eliminate these disparities and advance health equity in the United States.
Click here for the full story.
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Addressing Tobacco-Related Health Disparities—Faculty Members Support New Surgeon General’s Report
A new report from the U.S. Surgeon General’s office concludes that, despite progress in reducing tobacco use at the population level, disparities continue to exist, leaving a range of Americans more vulnerable to disease, disability, and premature death related to commercial tobacco. The report was published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Institute for Global Tobacco Control (IGTC) associate professor Ryan Kennedy, PhD, contributed to the report as a senior scientific editor, while IGTC director Joanna Cohen, PhD, served as a reviewer.
“At IGTC, we believe that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health, unburdened by the negative effects of tobacco,” said Kennedy. “Advancing tobacco-related health equity is central to the Surgeon General’s call-to-action, which entailed rigorous review of the latest scientific evidence behind disparity drivers, as well as the data on interventions to prevent and reduce health disparities, and a vision for equitably pursuing the tobacco endgame.”
The report asserts that the tobacco industry has specifically targeted these groups for decades, with products and marketing concentrated in communities with high populations of Black people, Hispanic people, and residents with lower incomes. It also pinpoints the design, engineering, and marketing of menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products as instrumental in perpetuating tobacco initiation, addiction, and sustained use.
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From Benefit Status to Transplants, CV Disparities Prove Tough to Tackle
It’s the differences in cardiovascular (CV) morbidity among patients who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid and those who are not. It’s the lingering challenge of trying to weed out disparities in heart transplant allocation. It’s the gap between the rates of sudden cardiac deaths suffered by Black and White men over time.
Posters presented Saturday during the 2024 American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions made it clear: Disparities in heart health remain entrenched, despite increased attention over the last decade. Three groups of posters centered on disparities research were presented during the morning session
Click here for the full report.
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AHA: Rural-Urban Disparities Persist in Cardiovascular Mortality
Between 2010 and 2022, cardiovascular mortality increased in rural areas and decreased in urban areas, according to a study scheduled for presentation at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2024. The researchers found that between 2010 and 2022, age-adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) were consistently highest in rural areas. Over time, AAMRs increased in rural areas (rate difference [RD], +3.4), while declining in urban areas (RD, −23.8), which was driven by a rise in AAMRs among younger rural adults (RD, +23.2). Older adults experienced a decline in AAMRs, although this decline was greater in urban areas compared with rural areas.
Click here for the full report.
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Beyond the silver bullet: closing the equity gap for children within a generation
Over the past decade, inequities in children's health, development and wellbeing have not improved despite great efforts globally.1The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has published a new study published in The Lancet that finds significant disparities in well-being among racial and ethnic groups, and across sex and age groups. In the first analysis of its kind, the Human Development Index (HDI) was adapted to examine trends and inequities at the individual rather than the group level from 2008 to 2021. Published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the HDI is an indicator of well-being composed of lifespan, education, and income and a statistical measurement of a country's average achievements in these three areas. IHME's adaptation of HDI used data from the American Community Survey (ACS) to estimate years of education and household spending, combined with life expectancy estimates based on death records, to estimate expected lifespan.
Click here for the full story.
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