With African Americans and Hispanics Diabetic population being twice as high as their White counterparts, conventional wisdom has always been that race  plays a major factor in contracting the disease.

A new study by researchers at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are about to throw that conventional wisdom out with the bath water  in a new study coming out in the October edition of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Researchers from the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities solutions and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine compared data from the 2003 National Health Interview  Survey (NHIS) with the Exploring Health Disparities in Integrated Communities Southwest Baltimore (EHDIC-SWB) Study.

The results being that when compared head to head, led to the conclusion that given the same environmental and  income  factors that both African Americans and Whites had the same diabetes rates while contrasting findings that Nationally the occurrence of diabetes is twice as much in African Americans than whites.

While there was overwhelming evidence that behaviour, medical care and environmental factors were a huge force behind racial disparity in overall health, according to the lead author of the study Thomas LaVeist, PhD, director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions. Genes were not as of themselves considered a majority risk factor in getting diabetes.

Now I know that this is just one study but it does raise a few interesting issues for me.

• As a father with a child that am fighting to prevent getting diabetes all the risk factors have to be considered in my journey and this study just illuminated one. which is that the socioeconomic and environmental factors are very much in play here. Meaning I have to factor in my being in the middle class with limited if not the highest level of access to health care.
• I did not get the disease most likely because I was an African American but most probably because I was poor and middle class.
• The responsibility of getting this disease lies more on myself than anything else. Should this journey be more of a self reflection is it simply because I was born on the wrong side of the tracks.

But all in all these studies on a personal level tend to create a mere pause for reflection and my conclusion.

Do whatever is necessary to get your family out of the middle class because its a cesspool of  everything that’s wrong with society today, that is if you listen to the pundits and experts.

you can find the complete finding of the study here