Kalewold Kalewold (University of Maryland, College Park)
Race is commonly considered a risk factor in many complex diseases including asthma, cardiovascular disease, renal disease, among others. While viewing races as genetically meaningful categories is scientifically controversial, empirical evidence shows that some racial health disparities persist even when controlling for socioeconomic status. This poster argues that a mechanistic approach is needed to resolve the issue of race in biomedical research.
The distinction between race-based studies, which hold that “differences in the risk of complex diseases among racial groups are largely due to genetic differences covarying with genetic ancestry which self-identified races are supposed to be good proxies for” (Lorusso and Bacchini 2015, 57), and race-neutral studies, which incorporate multiple factors by looking at individual level or population level genetic susceptibility, mirrors the “explanatory divide” Tabery (2014) highlights between statistical and mechanistic explanations in biology. In this poster I show that race-neutral studies constitute a Mechanism Discovery Approach (MDA) to investigating racial disparities. Using evidence from statistical studies, MDA seeks to build mechanism schemas that show causally relevant factors for racial disparities.
This poster shows how MDA illuminates the productively active components of disease mechanisms that lead to disparate health outcomes for different self-identified races. By eschewing the “genetic hypothesis”, which favors explanations of racial disparities in terms of underlying genetic differences between races, MDA reveals the mechanisms by which social, environmental, and race-neutral genetic factors, including past and present racism, interact to produce disparities in chronic health outcomes.
This poster focuses on the well-characterized disparity between birth weights of black and white Americans highlighted in Kuzawa and Sweet (2009). Their research in racial birthweight disparities provides sufficient evidence for a plausible epigenetic mechanism that produces the phenomenon. I argue that what makes their explanation of the racial disparity in US birth weights successful is that it is mechanistic. The mechanism is neither just hereditary or environmental; instead it is both; It is epigenetic. The poster will provide a diagram showing the mechanism. By showing how the various parts of the mechanism interact to produce the phenomena in question, MDA both avoids the pitfalls race-based studies while still accounting for the role of social races in mechanisms producing racial disparities. This approach also enables the identification of potential sites of intervention to arrest or reverse these disparities.
