Racial discrimination in medical care settings and opioid pain reliever misuse in a U.S. cohort: 1992 to 2015
Authors
Swift, Samuel L.Glymour, M. Maria
Elfassy, Tali
Lewis, Cora
Kiefe, Catarina I.
Sidney, Stephen
Calonico, Sebastian
Feaster, Daniel
Bailey, Zinzi
Zeki Al Hazzouri, Adina
UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of Quantitative Health SciencesDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2019-12-20Keywords
Social discriminationRacial discrimination
Opioids
Cardiology
Medical education
Epidemiology
Heroin
Death rates
Epidemiology
Health Services Administration
Health Services Research
Race and Ethnicity
Substance Abuse and Addiction
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Show full item recordAbstract
BACKGROUND: In the United States whites are more likely to misuse opioid pain relievers (OPRs) than blacks, and blacks are less likely to be prescribed OPRs than whites. Our objective is to determine whether racial discrimination in medical settings is protective for blacks against OPR misuse, thus mediating the black-white disparities in OPR misuse. METHODS: We used data from 3528 black and white adults in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study, an ongoing multi-site cohort. We employ causal mediation methods, with race (black vs white) as the exposure, lifetime discrimination in medical settings prior to year 2000 as the mediator, and OPR misuse after 2000 as the outcome. RESULTS: We found black participants were more likely to report discrimination in a medical setting (20.3% vs 0.9%) and less likely to report OPR misuse (5.8% vs 8.0%, OR = 0.71, 95% CI = 0.55, 0.93, adjusted for covariates). Our mediation models suggest that when everyone is not discriminated against, the disparity is wider with black persons having even lower odds of reporting OPR misuse (OR = 0.63, 95% CI = 0.45, 0.89) compared to their white counterparts, suggesting racial discrimination in medical settings is a risk factor for OPR misuse rather than protective. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that racial discrimination in a medical setting is a risk factor for OPR misuse rather than being protective, and thus could not explain the seen black-white disparity in OPR misuse.Source
PLoS One. 2019 Dec 20;14(12):e0226490. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0226490. eCollection 2019. Link to article on publisher's site
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0226490Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/41318PubMed ID
31860661Related Resources
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Copyright: © 2019 Swift et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Distribution License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1371/journal.pone.0226490
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Copyright: © 2019 Swift et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.