NIH Conference on Understanding and Reducing Disparities in Health

NIH Conference on Understanding and Reducing Disparities in Health:
Behavioral and Social Science - Research Contributions

October 23-24, 2006 - Bethesda, Maryland

Website: http://obssr.od.nih.gov/HealthDisparities/index.html

The conference focuses on three broad areas of action influencing health disparities: policy, prevention, and healthcare. It emphasize both basic research on the behavioral, social, and biomedical pathways giving rise to disparities in health and applied research on the development, testing, and delivery of interventions to reduce disparities in these three action areas.

The conference employs a multi-level analytic framework (i.e., ranging from individuals to societies). It includes research relevant to a wide range of population groups (e.g., variation by SES, race, ethnicity, gender) residing in the United States, while not attempting to provide detailed analyses of each and every group. Consideration is given to multiple public health issues and their interactions (e.g., multiple morbidities rather than single illnesses) and to risk factors or causal processes common to various health conditions (e.g., smoking, diet, exercise, access to health care).

Contact information : Suzanne Heurtin-Roberts, Ph.D. National Cancer Institute
co-chair of the organizing committee - sheurtin@mail.nih.gov

Health Disparities

Chronic Disease - Health Disparities: A Selected Bibliography: "Eliminating health disparities is an overarching goal of the Healthy People 2010 national public health agenda, and it is a top priority for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As part of the CDC Futures Initiative, we aim to eliminate health disparities by helping people who are at the greatest risk for poor health.
To accomplish these goals, we need effective interventions, such as those highlighted at the 19th National Conference on Chronic Disease Prevention and Control, March 1–3, 2005. The conference brings together leading experts on health disparities and is a collaboration between the CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP), the Prevention Research Centers, and the Association of State and Territorial Chronic Disease Program Directors.
This bibliography, prepared specifically for conference attendees, contains publication citations written by CDC staff and partners during the past four years. Included are peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and monographs focusing on the United States.
Whether you are just getting involved in efforts to eliminate health disparities or are a long-time supporter, we hope this bibliography provides the information you need to help close the gaps and reach populations bearing the greatest burden of poor health./.../"

Cardiovascular Health in the Developing World

De: procor-bounces@healthnet.org [mailto:procor-bounces@healthnet.org]
Em nome de "Maria Inês Reinert Azambuja"
Enviada em: quarta-feira, 26 de julho de 2006 18:07
Para: Cardiovascular Health in the Developing World
Assunto: [ProCOR] Re: ProCOR seeks your input (6)

Dear Catherine,
It is indisputable that, today, the main determinants of ill health and early mortality in Brazil and other countries of the Region are poverty and social exclusion.

Our population is ageing, and as well discussed by Leeder and colleagues in "A Race Against Time," chronic diseases shall become a huge problem here during the next decades, accompanying this demographic trend. Poverty-related deaths will tend to follow the demographic track. With less children, the main burden of poverty-related diseases and deaths will fall upon the adult population. As recognized in 1946 by two eminent cardiologists from our Medical School (FAMED-UFRGS) in Brazil,"Rich cardiac patients have a relatively long and tranquil life. The poor fall fast and recurrently in heart failure and stand still; their lives are short and painful" (Prof. Álvaro Barcelos Ferreira, 1943[1])

"Rest and adequate exercises, appropriate hours of work and leisure, hygienic housing and so on, are conditions which are out of the reach of the poor. It is even painful to prescribe them care, good life and treatment which they can not follow or afford. Soon after compensating a heart failure, they are obliged to go back to work - almost invariably inadequate to their condition, to the fight for life which throw them again in the failure of their central circulatory organ." (Prof. Thomaz Mariante[2], 1943)

Probably the great challenge that we need to address is how to plan feasible interventions to prevent and control the impact of chronic diseases in Brazil in the next years in a way that they become a component of the macroeconomic agenda towards Brazil development, and could contribute to lessen the social and health inequalities which have prevented us to grow.
And additionally, how to convince central economies of the advantages of this approach...

Overall population health results much more from production of services, insumes, medications and equipements (meaning economic strength) than from their consume. If our countries are not able to overcome the levels of urban poverty that exist today, political instability will increase and with it, ill health and deaths (overall).

The challenge that I would pose to the PROCOR team would be: how to use Chronic Diseases Prevention policies to reduce destitution and stimulate the economic growth of third world countries?
Best regards,
Maria Inês Azambuja, MD
School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Porto Alegre, RS Brazil miazambuja@terra.com.br
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[1] Ferreira AB. The social problem of the cardiac patient. In: Panteão Médico Rio-Grandense. Cultural and historical synthesis: progress and evolution of Medicine in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 1943.
[Portuguese]

[2] Mariante T. The problem of angiocardiopathies in Rio Grande do Sul. In:
Panteão Médico Rio-Grandense. Cultural and historical synthesis: progress and evolution of Medicine in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 1943.
[Portuguese]
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My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

Dr. Emanuel Derman will discuss his book My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (John Wiley & Sons). Wall Street is no longer the old-fashioned business it once was. In recent years, investment banks and hedge funds have increasingly turned to quantitative trading strategies and derivative securities for their profits, and have raided academia for PhDs to model these volatile products and manage their risk.

Nowadays, the fortunes of firms and the stability of markets often rest on mathematical models. "Quants"–the scientifically trained practitioners of quantitative finance who build these models–have become key players on the Wall Street stage.

And no Wall Street quant is better known than Emanuel Derman. One of the first high-energy particle physicists to migrate to Wall Street, he spent seventeen years in the business, eventually becoming managing director and head of the renowned Quantitative Strategies group at Goldman, Sachs & Co. There he coauthored some of today's most widely used and influential financial models, including the widely used Black-Derman-Toy model of interest rates.

Physics and quantitative finance look deceptively similar. But, writes Derman, "When you do physics you're playing against God; in finance, you're playing against God's creatures." How can one justify using the precise methods of physics in the frenzied world of financial markets? Is it reasonable to treat the economy and its markets as a complex machine? Or is quantitative finance merely flawed thinking masquerading as science, a brave whistling in the dark?