health disparities

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.

Higher genomic levels of African ancestry are associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease, a consortium of investigators reported recently in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

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.”

Vanderbilt researchers have found that selenium deficiency may contribute to the racial disparity in lung cancer incidence.

Unique molecular "fingerprints" could explain the disparity in Wilms tumor incidence and point to novel, race-specific therapeutic targets.

Vanderbilt research scientist Melinda Aldrich, Ph.D., MPH, has been awarded a National Institutes of Health Academic Career Award to investigate some of the genetic secrets behind a greater risk of lung cancer among African-Americans compared with other racial and ethnic groups.

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.