Word: race
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...deeper look at the research showed that clinical trials of Bidil - a combination of two generic heart drugs - involved only self-described African Americans, and that the drug was not useful for all blacks and very useful for some whites. In other words, the utility of the first race-based drug was not defined by race...
...wake of the Bidil controversy, a poll of some 600 physicians across the country, conducted by a marketing and research firm, found that 81% of doctors still believed race should be used as a biological basis for diagnosing disease...
...more recent study, published in Cancer Prevention Research, investigators sought to explain another race-based disparity, that whites survive certain head and neck cancers more often than blacks. There was a biological mechanism at play, the authors found: the presence of the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus (HPV), which appeared to protect patients with oropharyngeal cancer. HPV-positive patients had a five times higher rate of cancer survival than HPV-negative patients; as it turned out, whites had a nine times higher rate of HPV infection than blacks, which the researchers believed largely explained the difference in survival...
...with this particular cancer, the survival gap may well be attributed to sociocultural differences in sexual habits, says Brawley, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. In the hands of another researcher, he says, perhaps these findings would have been chalked up to some unknown biological difference involving race...
Fundamentally researchers do not dispute the fact that biology - namely genetics - helps determine individual health outcomes. But the practice of categorizing patients by race has yet to further the discovery of significant gene mutations. What's more, say critics, it promotes racial thinking while dismissing the more germane issue of socioeconomics. Indeed, Albain and her coauthors used a single, widely disputed metric in their study - patients' zip codes linked to census tract data - to "adjust" for socioeconomic status. Yet researchers know that people living within one zip code can include the city's wealthiest and poorest residents. And even...