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Health Disparities
The National Cancer Institute has designated reducing health disparities as a special
challenge. The Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) health
disparities mission is to monitor the differential burden of cancer among Americans and
promote and conduct research that identifies and addresses the economic, social, cultural,
psychological, behavioral, and biological mechanisms contributing to these disparities
across the cancer control continuum and throughout the human lifespan.
From the
surveillance perspective, several data and methodologic issues exist. Through program
support and collaboration, there has been improvement in the data systems to advance our
understanding of health disparities, particularly the complex factors that are associated
with or mitigate differences in health status or outcome. Included in this constellation
of issues are those related to:
- misclassification of race/ethnicity for cancer cases and
deaths,
- limited data on measures of socioeconomic status at the individual and societal
levels,
- identification of indicators for health disparities and indices or summary
measures of health disparities within a population group, and
- the conflicting objectives
of protecting confidentiality in the context of reporting data for small geographic areas
or small subsets of population groups.
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