How Is Race Used in Laboratory Medicine Practices?
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Brandy Gunsolus
In this program:
How have laboratory medicine practices used race-based corrections? Laboratory medicine scientist Dr. Brandy Gunsolus discusses race-based corrections, impact to kidney diseases patients, and where things stand in laboratory medicine practices today.
Transcript
Interviewer:
How is the concept of race utilized in current laboratory medicine practices?
Dr. Brandy Gunsolus:
So right now, laboratory is in the middle of a transition, and it's a long, overdue transition. We have roughly the last 20, 25 years, been doing race corrections when it pertains to kidney function tests, especially when it comes to what's called an eGFR, and it's based off of a creatinine level, and gender and weight and height, and it's all those into this equation, and this value, that result of this equation tells you what kind of stage of kidney disease that you're in. In the last 20 or so years, they have also factored in ethnicity, specifically, the African American population, and that should be noted that we're the only country in the world that does it, that was doing this, nobody else was doing this. And a lot of that came out of research that occurred that was very racially motivated research originally, and is unfortunate that that happened, and the industry is now working to correct that, and we have now been removing that race correction. It wasn't a correction, it was really detrimental to the African American population, as they would not be diagnosed with kidney disease until they were way far advanced and wouldn't be put on the transplant list until they were much sicker than other ethnicities. So the laboratory industry has been working hard to fix that.
I know in my laboratory, it's been now almost two years since we removed that race-based correction. Many of the larger laboratories have removed it. We're still trying to get some of the smaller laboratories to make that change, it's hard for physicians to acknowledge that they've essentially been practicing medicine incorrectly, especially when it pertains to a specific ethnic population of their patients, but they have to basically say, "I'm sorry, but we've been treating you unfairly, and now we're going to try to correct this."
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