Stony Brook part of federally funded study of health disparities among Latinos in low-income communities
Stony Brook University is one of five schools awarded a grant to study health care disparities among Latinos in low-income immigrant communities. Credit: Newsday / John Paraskevas
Research teams from five universities, including Stony Brook, have been given a near $4 million National Institutes of Health grant to study health care disparities among Latinos in low-income immigrant communities.
The five-year, $3.8 million grant from the NIH's National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities will focus on large immigrant communities, including New York, Philadelphia and San Juan, Puerto Rico, and examine why certain legal hurdles make Hispanics more vulnerable to cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, HIV, asthma and substance use disorders, officials said.
"We're talking about denials by insurance companies, disability insurance coverage, illegal housing evictions, unsafe working environments, food security, domestic violence, discrimination, and of course, for immigrants you have the potential issues of migration legal issues," said Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, a professor in Stony Brook's School of Social Welfare and one of the lead investigators on the project.
Muñoz-Laboy said a network of community health centers could potentially be included in the study, including several on Long Island, although it was not immediately clear which communities could be included.
The research team includes experts in public health, the law and social welfare from Stony Brook, Boston University, the University of Central Florida, George Washington University and the University of Puerto Rico.
Hispanics are the fastest-growing population in the United States, reaching 62.1 million people in 2020, an increase of 23% over the previous decade, U.S. Census figures show.
But the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Minority Health has found widespread health care disparities among Hispanics, particularly those in medically underserved communities.
For example, Hispanic adults are 70% more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes and twice as likely to visit an emergency department for asthma, federal data shows. Latino men, meanwhile, are twice as likely to die from HIV infection while Hispanic women are 40% more likely to be diagnosed with cervical cancer and 30% more likely to succumb to the disease, federal data shows.
Hispanics also have the highest uninsured rates among any racial or ethnic group, with only half reporting in the 2020 U.S. Census that they had private insurance coverage, as compared to nearly 74% among all other populations, according to Office of Minority Health data.
Martine Hackett, an associate professor of health professions at Hofstra University and an expert on health disparities, said the study proposed a "novel approach" to addressing health disparities among Hispanics.
"By focusing on the multidimensional factors that affect health, including unmet legal and social needs, this research study promises to identify and address the fundamental causes of poor health outcomes in this population," Hackett said Tuesday. "The study also includes a mix of urban and suburban Latinx populations and will hopefully uncover approaches to address their varied needs."
One of the goals of the study, Muñoz-Laboy said, is to explore having more lawyers in primary care settings, freeing up doctors and nurses to focus more on medicine.
"By having legal services we will streamline primary care," he said. "It's a system of integrated care. And we cannot only address the issues affecting the patient, but we are going to do legal prevention and try to prevent issues before they escalate."
Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.
