UAB: Historical Housing Discrimination and Shortfalls in Colon Cancer Treatment Linked

By Jeff Hansen | UAB News A nationwide study of 196 cities shows that housing discrimination from 90 years ago still casts a historical shadow of inequities in colon cancer care today, S.M. Qasim Hussaini, M.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and colleagues at the American Cancer Society and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health report in the journal JCO Oncology Practice. In the 1930s, the federally sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, or HOLC, used racial composition to map out residential areas worthy of receiving mortgage loans and those areas to avoid. Neighborhoods high in Black, immigrant or minority non-white populations were red-lined as hazardous for home loans, creating systemic and persistent disinvestment in those neighborhoods, along with wealth inequities and concentration of health-harming exposures and psychosocial stressors. These limitations reduced access to health-promoting goods and resources such as green space, parks and healthy foods in redlined neighborhoods. Qasim Hussaini, M.D. (Jennifer Alsabrook-Turner) To test whether residence in the formerly red-lined neighborhoods is associated with poorer guideline-concordant cancer care today, Hussaini and colleagues mapped colon cancer care for 149,917 newly diagnosed colon cancer patients from 2007 through 2017, as detailed in the National Cancer Database, against current-day residence...