Grouping All Asians Together Could Be Bad For Health
source: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=015fb08939d8b0e72e1ab66356...
Grouping All Asians Together Could Be Bad For Health
New America Media, News Report, Paul Kleyman, Posted: Apr 05, 2010
Asian Americans as a group are half as likely as non-Hispanic whites to die from heart disease. But Native Hawaiians are 40 percent more apt to suffer from heart disease than whites. That’s just one example of a health threat that gets lost when all Asians are statistically blended into the category “Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (AA/NHPI).”
The May 2010 issue of the American Journal of Public Health is entirely devoted to health concerns for AA/NHPI populations and is being hailed as a milestone for showing that bundling statistics for all Asians projects, according to a University of Toronto study, an “inaccurate and misleading” picture, which “fails to identify particularly vulnerable groups.”
“We’re constantly being lumped together as the ‘model minority’ that has fewer health problems than other groups,” explained Marguerite J. Ro, deputy director of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum (APIAHF) in San Francisco.
Although many group differences seem obvious, the common practice of statistical blending in health studies tends to wash out critical differences that would give public health experts information they need to target research and community programs effectively.
For example, Ro said, aggregating so many groups masks Pacific Islander health disparities. “That makes them a minority within an already invisible minority,” she stated.
Among other sharp differences examined in the journal between “Asian” groups are that older Filipinos in the United States stand a far greater chance of being disabled than Japanese Americans, Vietnamese seniors are far more likely than Koreans and “Asians” in general to incur Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive problems, and Hmong in California experience rates of liver and cervical cancer triple or quadruple those of other AA/NHPI groups.
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New America Media, News Report, Paul Kleyman, Posted: Apr 05, 2010
Asian Americans as a group are half as likely as non-Hispanic whites to die from heart disease. But Native Hawaiians are 40 percent more apt to suffer from heart disease than whites. That’s just one example of a health threat that gets lost when all Asians are statistically blended into the category “Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (AA/NHPI).”
The May 2010 issue of the American Journal of Public Health is entirely devoted to health concerns for AA/NHPI populations and is being hailed as a milestone for showing that bundling statistics for all Asians projects, according to a University of Toronto study, an “inaccurate and misleading” picture, which “fails to identify particularly vulnerable groups.”
“We’re constantly being lumped together as the ‘model minority’ that has fewer health problems than other groups,” explained Marguerite J. Ro, deputy director of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum (APIAHF) in San Francisco.
Although many group differences seem obvious, the common practice of statistical blending in health studies tends to wash out critical differences that would give public health experts information they need to target research and community programs effectively.
For example, Ro said, aggregating so many groups masks Pacific Islander health disparities. “That makes them a minority within an already invisible minority,” she stated.
Among other sharp differences examined in the journal between “Asian” groups are that older Filipinos in the United States stand a far greater chance of being disabled than Japanese Americans, Vietnamese seniors are far more likely than Koreans and “Asians” in general to incur Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive problems, and Hmong in California experience rates of liver and cervical cancer triple or quadruple those of other AA/NHPI groups.
read the rest at
www.NewAmericaMedia.org
www.YouthOutlook.org
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