“As we get better and better at making these therapies and shorten the time frame even more, economies of scale will kick in and I would expect the costs to come down,” Musunuru said.
used in medical decisions — treatment guidelines, diagnostic tests, risk calculators — adjust the answers according to race or ethnicity in a way that puts people of color at disadvantage.Given how embedded these equations are in medical software and electronic records, even doctors may not realize how widely they impact care decisions.
“Health equity scholars have been raising alarm bells about the way race has been misused in clinical algorithms for decades,” said Dr. Michelle Morse, New York City’s chief medical officer.Change is beginning, slowly. No longer are obstetricians supposed to include race in determining the risk of a pregnant woman attempting vaginal birth after a prior C-section. The American Heart Association just removed race from a commonly used calculator of people’s heart disease risk. The American Thoracic Society has urged replacing race-based lung function evaluation.The kidney saga is unique because of the effort to remedy a past wrong.
“Lots of time when we see health inequities, we just assume there’s nothing we can do about it,” Morse said. “We can make changes to restore faith in the health system and to actually address the unfair and avoidable outcomes that Black people and other people of color face.”Black Americans are over three times more likely than white people to experience kidney failure. Of the roughly 89,000 people currently on the waiting list for a new kidney, about 30% are Black.
Race isn’t a biological factor like age, sex or weight — it’s a social construct. So how did it make its way into calculations of kidney function?
The eGFR, or estimated glomerular filtration rate, evaluates kidney health based on how quickly a waste compound called creatinine gets filtered from blood. In 1999, an equation used to calculate eGFR was modified to adjust Black people’s results compared to everyone else’s, based on some studies with small numbers of Black patients and a long-ago false theory about differences in creatinine levels. Until recently that meant many lab reports would list two results — one calculated for non-Black patients and another for Black patients that could overestimate kidney function by as much as 16%.found that about 7 in 10 U.S. adults think transgender female athletes should not be allowed to participate in girls and women’s sports at the high school, college or professional level. That view was shared by about 9 in 10 Republicans and roughly half of Democrats.
The federation announced the change after Trump threatened to pull federal funding from California unless itfrom competing on girls teams. The federation said it decided on the change before then.
The U.S. Department of Justice also said it would investigate the federation and the district that includes Hernandez’s high school to determine whether they violated federal sex discrimination law.California law allows trans students to compete on sex-segregated sports teams consistent with their gender identity.