ICL COMMUNITY COMMUNICATIONS
The Seven deadly diseases for African Americans
There are several deadly diseases that strike black Americans more often than other ethnicities. With the knowledge that we have today we can aid in this fight against genetics, awareness and health disparities. Much research has been dedicated to find out more about these illnesses that strike our families and to explore a system for implementing more advanced tests. The main focus is to improve health education by promoting prevention by means of awareness.
* Diabetes - 60% more common in black Americans than in white Americans. Blacks are up to 2.5 times more likely to suffer a limb amputation and up to 5.6 times more likely to suffer kidney disease than other people with diabetes.
* Asthma - African-Americans are three times more likely to die of asthma than white Americans.
* Sarcoidosis – Death by lung scarring is 16 times more common among blacks than among whites.
* Lung cancer - Black men are 50% more likely than white men to get lung cancer despite less use of tobacco.
* Strokes – Kill 4 times more 35- to 54-year-old black Americans than white Americans. Blacks have nearly twice the first-time stroke risk of whites.
* Hypertension - Nearly 42% of black men and more than 45% of black women aged 20 and older have high blood pressure. Blacks develop high blood pressure earlier in life and with much higher blood pressure levels than whites.
* Cancer - Black men have a 40% higher cancer death rate than white men. African-American women have a 20% higher cancer death rate than white women.
Cancer Awareness & Preventive Screening
African Americans have the highest death rate and shortest survival of any racial and ethnic group in the US for most cancers. There has been a reduction in cancer death rates over the past two decades. Death rates have shown to drop in blacks than in whites for all cancers combined and racial disparities for these cancers have narrowed. Although In contrast, the racial disparity has widened for breast cancer in women and remained constant for colorectal cancer in men, likely due to inequalities in access to care, including screening and treatment. 2018, American Cancer Society.
The most commonly diagnosed cancers among black men are:
Prostate (31% of all cancers)
lung (15%)
Colon and rectum (9%).
Among black women, the most common cancers are:
Breast (32% of all cancers)
lung (11%)
Colon and rectum (9%)