Causes of well-known racial disparities in health are often hard to tease out, but researchers of the Hopkins Medical Institutions are trying anyhow. One team, led by Hsin-Chieh Yeh, has undertaken a study to determine unknown causes of racial disparities between diabetes prevalence in white and African American populations.
Diabetes is more common in African American populations, which is partially attributable to socioeconomic, body weight, health and genetic differences between populations.
But even those risk factors don’t wholly account for the high prevalence of diabetes in African Americans (who are 70 percent more likely than white counterparts to suffer from the disease).
In particular, the team led by Yeh found a correlation between levels of potassium, a common dietary mineral, and diabetes; their findings suggest that decreased levels of potassium in the blood are correlated with increased risk of diabetes.
Because it is an established fact that African Americans tend to have lower blood potassium levels than Caucasians, the data furthermore suggest that potassium levels may explain unaccounted for disparities between racial populations.
Though Yeh’s study doesn’t demonstrate how potassium levels increase risk for diabetes, nor whether simply increasing levels of the mineral in the blood will decrease the gap between races, it provides a firm foundation for other research to discover exactly those things.
If the matter is a simple problem of deficiency, potassium supplements and/or dietary changes could easily be implemented to decrease African Americans’ risks for developing diabetes.
At the very least, the study now provides health care and public health workers with the information needed to better account for and deal with specific health problems in various patient sub-populations.
