Racism and Health Disparities in Diverse Populations
Summary
Racism operates across individual, institutional and structural levels to produce and perpetuate inequities in health outcomes among marginalised groups. Systemic racism encompasses policies, practices and cultural norms that restrict access to resources such as quality healthcare, education, safe housing and economic opportunity. These obstacles generate both direct and indirect pathways to poorer physical and mental health, ranging from chronic stress and its physiological consequences to reduced uptake of preventive services. Discrimination in clinical settings can undermine trust, compromise communication and deter adherence to treatment. Moreover, the interplay of racism with other axes of identity—such as gender, socioeconomic status and sexual orientation—exacerbates health disparities through intersecting vulnerabilities. Globally, attention has focused on how historical patterns of exclusion and contemporary forms of bias contribute to disproportionate burdens of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, mental illness and infectious disease in racially minoritised communities. Emerging research underscores the resilience and adaptive strategies employed by affected populations, while charting avenues for policy reform, community engagement and structural intervention to mitigate the health effects of racism.
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Racism and Health Disparities in Diverse Populations publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in racism and health disparities in diverse populations across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Systemic racism: Institutional and structural policies and practices that produce and perpetuate racial inequities across societies.
Intersectionality: Analytical framework recognising how overlapping social identities and related systems of oppression shape individual experiences and outcomes.
Meta-analysis: Statistical technique for combining data from multiple studies to derive an overall estimate of effect size or association.
Mediation: Statistical process by which an intermediate variable transmits the effect of an exposure (e.g. discrimination) on an outcome (e.g. health status).
References
- Racism as a Determinant of Health: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. PLOS ONE (2015).
- Racism and health service utilisation: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS ONE (2017).
- Methods for analytic intercategorical intersectionality in quantitative research: Discrimination as a mediator of health inequalities. Social Science & Medicine (2019).
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