Longer schooling results in better health

Education levels may join race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status as contributors to health outcomes.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. May 13, 2002.

Washington -- Researchers are taking a closer look at why race, ethnicity, socioeconomic level or level of education should make a difference in an individual's health.

That the disparities exist is widely accepted.

"Disparities in the health care delivered to racial and ethnic minorities are real and are associated with worse outcomes in many cases, which is unacceptable," said Alan Nelson, MD, former AMA president and the chair of an Institute of Medicine committee that released a report on the issue last month.

"The real challenge lies not in debating whether disparities exist, but in developing and implementing strategies to reduce and eliminate them," Dr. Nelson said.

From 1992 to 1997, five-year survival rates after a cancer diagnosis were 63% for whites and 52% for blacks, according to recent research.

This disparity has caused some to hypothesize that genetic or biological differences between the races was the cause.

However, researchers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City and Winship Cancer Center at Emory University in Atlanta found that theory lacking. After examining numerous studies that represented 189,877 white and 32,004 black cancer patients, they found that biological differences between the races could account for, at most, only a small fraction of cancer deaths.

"Therefore, biological differences between blacks and whites cannot explain a meaningful share of the racial disparity in cancer survival observed in the United States," the researchers concluded in an article in the April 26 JAMA. [...]