New study from Harvard identifies transgender health disparities

New study from Harvard identifies transgender health disparities
©2014 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers

Transgender individuals are medically underserved and their healthcare needs incompletely understood in part because they represent a subpopulation whose health is rarely monitored by U.S. national surveillance systems. To address these issues, a new study compared methods of collecting and analyzing data to assess health disparities in a clinical sample of transgender individuals, as reported in an article published in LGBT Health.

Sari Reisner, ScD and coauthors, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, and Fenway Health, Boston MA, compared transgender and non-transgender patients on measures such as substance abuse, HIV infection, lifetime suicide attempts, and social stressors including violence and discrimination. They report their findings in the article "Transgender Health Disparities: Comparing Full Cohort and Nested Matched Pair Study Designs in a Community Health Center".

"Clinic-based samples and patient-related data are under-utilized sources of information about transgender health, particularly in community-based, urban health centers that typically serve large numbers of transgender patients," says Editor-in-Chief William Byne, MD, PhD, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY. "Reisner and coauthors describe a method of handling such data to provide valid results while maximizing efficiency with respect to time and resources."

More information: The article is available free on the LGBT Health website at http://www.liebertpub.com/lgbt.

Citation: New study from Harvard identifies transgender health disparities (2014, April 15) retrieved 29 March 2024 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-04-harvard-transgender-health-disparities.html
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