Tag Archives: Race/ethnicity

June 2022—How race shows up in the medical school curriculum and what to do about it was the focus of a grand rounds by Andrea T. Deyrup, MD, PhD, and Joseph L. Graves Jr., PhD, presented virtually this spring to the University of Minnesota Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, on behalf of the department’s diversity, equity, and inclusion committee.

December 2021—There are success stories. There are overnight success stories. And then there are things that just seem to happen overnight—minus the success. In the midst of chronic discontent over the use of a race coefficient in equations for estimating glomerular filtration rate, one San Francisco hospital sought to make a change. The hope was to help end disparities in health care, such as lower kidney transplantation rates in Black people with chronic kidney disease. The change at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital was pushed by what Neil Powe, MD, MPH, MBA, calls “a very small group of faculty and trainees lobbying the lab, unbeknownst to others.” The lab reported two values, using the eGFR equation with and without the race coefficient, but assigned “high muscle mass” and “low muscle mass” to the two values as a way to step around the troubling race component. Dr. Powe, the hospital’s chief of medicine, doesn’t mince words when he considers how the change was made. “And it stereotyped ethnic groups even more,” he says.

October 2021—It’s not quite six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but the connection between Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers and equity in medicine is real (and far more important). It’s a trail researchers have been following for some time, but which has gained more prominence with the recent approval of a new drug for treating the disease (aducanumab) and the acknowledgment of racial disparities in CSF amyloid and tau biomarkers and their associated cutoffs.