20 Sep NIH collaboration seeks to help understand U.S. burden of health disparities: Why your county matters

By Eliseo J. Perez-Stable, MD, National Institutes of Health

Since the early 1990s, federal support of research has increased to understand minority health and identify and address health disparities. Research in these areas has evolved from a starting point of developing a basic descriptive understanding of health disparities and who is most affected. Now, it is discovering the underlying complexity of factors involved in health outcomes to inform interventions and reduce these disparities.

One of these many factors is where we live, learn, work, and play and how that affects different people. A group of NIH scientists and their colleagues recently published a study in the journal The Lancet that they hope is a step toward better understanding geographic disparities and their role in health equity.

As Director of NIH’s National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), I worked with NIMHD’s Scientific Director, Anna María Nápoles, to conceive the study and establish the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) U.S. Health Disparities Collaborators at NIH with five NIH Institutes and two Offices. Through this collaboration, NIH funded the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington to conduct the analysis. The IHME has worked for 30 years on the GBD project in over 200 countries.

The Lancet paper offered the first comprehensive U.S. county-level life expectancy estimates to highlight the significant gaps that persist among racial and ethnic populations across the nation. The analysis revealed that despite overall life expectancy gains of 2.3 years from 2000–2019, Black populations experienced shorter life expectancy than White populations. Read more …