Closer Look
Doctors who may have benefited from affirmative action also paid a price
Mike Reddy for STAT
Psychiatrist Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu has mixed feelings about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to ditch affirmative action. She has no quarrel with widening educational opportunities that lead to more Black doctors and less health inequity for disadvantaged communities throughout this country. "But affirmative action policies also expose Black doctors-in-training to more racism, the effects of which both debase the intent of the practice and undermine the oath to do no harm," she writes in her column, Off the Charts.
She survived her medical education after graduating from Harvard, where she says her top grades may have been supplemented by affirmative action policies, as classmates gossiped. Her experience at the University of Virginia brings to mind two metaphors: transplants and weathering. Affirmative action transplants people into bodies that are primed to reject them, and they weather that storm to survive, but at what cost? "Doctors are patients, too," she writes. Read more.
health inequity
Cancer researchers work to understand populations 'under-studied for so long'
Prostate cancer disproportionately affects Black men, who tend to have more dangerous and aggressive forms of the cancer. Black women are 41% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women. Researchers launching the African Cancer Genome Registry want to know why. "We've been under-studied for so long," said Sophia George, a breast cancer researcher at the University of Miami School of Medicine and a Black woman. "And now there is a movement afoot to be more intentional about studying populations that experience higher burden of disease."
George and co-primary investigator Camille Ragin, a prostate cancer researcher from Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, are looking at genetic factors as well as socioeconomic and lifestyle factors that influence the disease. They hope to answer genetic and environmental questions across different populations, including how diet and BMI might influence the incidence of cancer, especially in young Black people. STAT's Deborah Balthazar has more.
cancer
AI-supported mammograms show preliminary promise
As we sometimes say, caveats first: This is a planned interim analysis from a single center showing potential, but not primary outcome results. Still, the news looks promising for enlisting AI to help make mammography screening better. The findings published in The Lancet Oncology show that among 80,000 women in Sweden participating in the randomized trial, AI helped detect 20% more cancers than the standard readings by two breast radiologists working without such assistance. Notably, AI support did not elevate false positives (meaning an incorrect diagnosis of a normal mammogram as abnormal). It did cut radiologists' reading time by nearly half.
We won't know for several years whether AI helped reduce what are known as interval cancers — those found between regular screenings and often with a worse prognosis — in 100,000 patients and whether its use is justified, the authors caution.
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