Native Hawaiian researcher teases out health disparities in new cancer study
UCLA findings show breast cancer rates highest among Native Hawaiian women
Native Hawaiian assistant professor Kekoa Taparra at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health recently introduced new insights into cancer rates among different demographic groups in the U.S.
Taparra and the UCLA team disaggregated cancer data for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander patients from Asian American statistics to shed light on health disparities that weren’t previously understood. This innovative approach showed Native Hawaiian women have the highest incidence of breast cancer out of all U.S. populations, and the breast cancer incidence rate for Native Hawaiian women is 27% higher than it is for white women.
The researchers followed federal guidelines advising against combining Asian American cancer rate data with the information on cancer prevalence among Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations. Taparra said in a UCLA article by Brad Smith that these guidelines haven’t been in wide use since they were established almost 30 years ago.
The results of this work provided additional demographic breakdowns that can inform health outcomes beyond the Native Hawaiian population. The co-authors found Korean people have the highest stomach cancer incidence of any U.S. racial-ethnic group, Vietnamese people experience the highest liver cancer rates and Samoan women rank the highest in the incidence of uterine corpus cancer.
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