UConn Professor Leading New Journal On Health Disparities - Hartford Courant

In recent years, Dr. Cato T. Laurencin of the University of Connecticut has focused on the questions of why certain medical conditions affect different racial and ethnic groups and how the health care system treats people differently.

Now Laurencin, a professor of orthopedic surgery, will head up a new journal that will focus exclusively on that topic.

The Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities will have its first issue in March, although papers will begin appearing online in January. Laurencin, who is also chief executive officer of the Connecticut Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (CICATS) at UConn, will serve as its editor-in-chief.

The journal will be edited at UConn and published by the W. Montague Cobb/National Medical Association (NMA) Health Institute and Springer, a publisher of science and medical journals.

Laurencin, who has spoken on the topic at several medical conferences, said he saw a need for a publication that focuses specifically on the matter of health disparities.

"This journal looks to identify the causes and we're also interested in intervention that will decrease and eventually eliminate these disparities," he said.

Laurencin said there are 15 to 20 critical areas where health disparities are most prominent. The causes of these disparities are many-fold, he said.

"It's a combination of effects," Laurencin said. "We know, for instance, that African Americans and Latinos suffer from different health effects and different diseases at disproportionately higher rates than other groups."

African Americans, for instance, are 1.8 times more likely to have diabetes than white people, according to the American Diabetes Association. African American women are 41 percent more likely to die from breast cancer than white women, although the overall incidence is lower, according to the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

There's also the matter of racial bias, he said.

"Some very fascinating studies have been performed," he said. In one, he said, physicians denied any bias in surveys but were found to have unconscious bias through a series of tests. Another study monitored the treatment of certain patients in emergency rooms. Although the patients complained of the same symptoms of chest pains, Laurencin said, researchers found that "the white patients would be given the more aggressive, state-of-the art treatment."

In the past two decades, he said, there's little evidence to suggest that the gaps in treatment have improved much.

"Hopefully with the Affordable Care Act, we'll see an improvement in access to care," he said.

Besides Laurencin, the editorial board includes several UConn faculty members, including co-managing editor Dr. Linda Barry, assistant professor of surgery; and assistant managing editor Kevin Wai Hong Lo, an assistant professor in the department of medicine.

"This is very important to the University of Connecticut, where we think we can be a national and even international leader in health disparities," Laurencin said. "Having a journal have its home here in the University of Connecticut, I think it really demonstrates its commitment to health disparities."