Work

The Pathology of Poverty

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: Health inequities have a long history of being attributed to intrinsic inferiority or deleterious individual behavior.Beginning with seminal work by W.E.B.Du Bois over a century ago and continuing with transdisciplinary work at present, the notion of engrained physiologic inferiority, biologic racism, and class-based variation in disease susceptibility has been systematically dismantled.[1][2][3] Yet most efforts to address both racial and socioeconomic disparities in health, including well-documented inequity in breast cancer outcomes, have focused efforts on patient education, behavior modification, and increased access to both diagnostic and therapeutic health care.Such initiatives, while undoubtedly playing a role in improving outcomes, fail to recognize let alone address the social drivers that often predetermine disparate experiences before any diagnosis is even made.Understanding the pathology of poverty has only recently gained traction as a means to identifying drivers and mediators of health inequities including well-documented disparities in breast cancer outcomes.In this issue of Annals of Surgery, Dr. Neha Goel and colleagues apply a transdisciplinary approach to understanding significant variation and disparities in breast cancer outcomes.4 In their study, ZIP code to genomic code: neighborhood disadvantage, aggressive breast cancer biology, and breast cancer outcomes, the authors examine the interaction between patient-level molecular and clinical characteristics, census-level socioeconomic measures, and patient-reported perceived social deprivation among 147 women with breast cancer

Source: Annals of Surgery

DOI: 10.1097/sla.0000000000006504

Authors: Andrew P. Loehrer, Saania Mirpuri, Oluwadamilola M. Fayanju