Apparently race could play a major role in several things. Pertaining to the above topic, a new study from Yale School of Public Health claims that blacks are admitted to the hospital at a considerably younger age as compared to their white counterparts for numerous avoidable medical conditions. This could signify that blacks must have obtained insufficient treatment for those conditions in the years ensuing to their hospitalization.
The study authors apparently analyzed discharge records for about 6,815 white and black adult patients at almost 500 hospitals. They supposedly discovered wide age disproportions for a variety of severe and chronic health conditions, counting diabetes, high blood pressure and pneumonia.
Subsequent to factoring in insurance and other variables, the study team headed by Jeannette R. Ickovics, Ph.D., apparently discovered that blacks were hospitalized, on average, five and a half years before their white peers went through the same conditions. Black adults were supposedly hospitalized on an average of nine years earlier as compared to whites for all health conditions pooled together.
The largest dissimilarity i.e. a 12-year difference was apparently discovered in uninhibited diabetes and a 7.5 year disparity was seen in bacterial pneumonia. A dozen diseases were gauged, and considerable distinctions were also discovered for hospitalization with severe and acute obstructive pulmonary disease, congestive heart failure and dehydration.
Ickovics, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health and director of CARE: Community Alliance for Research and Engagement, commented, “While the younger age at hospitalization was not necessarily surprising, the magnitude of the difference was indeed surprising. Consider the direct and indirect health and economic consequences of hospitalization for uncontrolled diabetes at age 46 for a black man compared to age 58 for a white man.”
Lead author Katie Brooks Biello, a doctoral student at Yale School of Public Health, remarked, “Individuals who receive adequate and timely ambulatory care for conditions such as diabetes would not need to be hospitalized as early due to complications and a worsening in severity of these conditions. A delay in hospitalizations would reduce social and economic burdens on individuals, families and society as a whole.”
While preceding studies have recognized ethnic disparities in rates of hospitalization, health status, health care access and disease burden, this is claimed to be the first study to detect racial inequalities in the age of adults during hospitalization.
The study would be published in the January issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.