News Briefs
Georgetown Medicine
New Community-Based Office Will Address Health Disparities Georgetown University Medical Center has opened a community-based office designed to research and reduce cancer disparities among minority and underserved communities in the nation’s capital.
“This office enables us to better engage the greater D.C. community and to address real challenges to help improve the health of our neighbors.” —Louis Weiner, M.D.
“We recognized that to achieve meaningful gains toward reducing health disparities, our research teams need to be in the community to engage directly with those who are most affected,” said Howard Federoff, M.D., Ph.D., executive vice president for health sciences at GUMC. The Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities Research, located in southeast Washington, provides a community “anchor” for the cancer-related research already underway as part of a $6.1 million grant awarded to GUMC earlier this year by the National Institutes of Health.
Research Responsibilities Internationally renowned cancer epidemiologist Lucile Adams-Campbell, Ph.D., associate director for minority health and health disparities research at Lombardi, is leading the effort. “We hear so much about health disparities, and people often think that it’s only about blacks and whites,” Adams-Campbell said during the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the center. “But health disparities is defined as any inequity in treatment of services that includes race, gender, physical and mental disabilities, occupation, location, geography, age and education.” The District of Columbia has one of the highest cancer mortality rates in the nation, ranking highest for prostate cancer, second highest for breast cancer, third highest for cervical cancer and seventh highest in the nation for all cancers combined, according to the DC Cancer Consortium. The city’s African-American population is disproportionately affected by cancer. Blacks in D.C. are 9 percent more likely to be diagnosed with breast, cervical, prostate, lung and colon cancers when compared with their white neighbors, and 49 percent of these African-Americans are likely to die from these diseases, according to the DC Cancer Consortium. There are many reasons for the disproportionate numbers, Adams-Campbell said, including an inherent susceptibility to more aggressive forms of cancer, environmental factors and barriers to health education, insurance and treatment. “This office was born out of our commitment to reducing health disparities in the community and the recognition that we can’t expect the people who are most affected to always come find us on campus,” said Louis Weiner, M.D., director of Georgetown Lombardi. “This office enables us to better engage the greater D.C. community and to address real challenges to help improve the health of our neighbors.” It also represents yet another way in which Georgetown is carrying out its mission of engagement and educational outreach to the surrounding community.
Targeted Interventions In addition to disproportionately high cancer mortality rates, Washington has higherthan-average disparity rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Overall, more than 22 percent of adults 18 and older are obese in the District, 28 percent have hypertension and 8 percent have Type 2 diabetes, according to the D.C. Department of Health.
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Spring 2013