Does redlining increase the risk of diabetes?
Investigators have analyzed the direct and indirect associations between structural racism and the prevalence of diabetes in the United States, according to a study in Diabetes Care.
The investigators used diabetes prevalence data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Prevention’s PLACES 2019 database, redlining data from the Mapping Inequity project’s historic Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps and census data from the Opportunity Insights database to assess whether factors related to structural racism — such as discrimination, incarceration, poverty, substance use, housing, highest level of education, unemployment status and food access — could impact the rate of diabetes. They included 11,375 census tracts in the study.
After adjusting for the 2010 population, the investigators discovered that redlining was directly linked to a higher crude prevalence of diabetes and indirectly linked to diabetes prevalence through incarceration, poverty, discrimination, substance use, housing, education, unemployment and food access.
The investigators hope that their findings can lead to the development of targeted interventions to reduce the rate of diabetes within at-risk patients.
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