Abstract
Precision Medicine, the practice of targeting prevention and therapies according to an individual’s lifestyle, environment or genetics, holds promise to improve population health outcomes. Within precision medicine, pharmacogenomics (PGX) uses an individual’s genome to determine drug response and dosing to tailor therapy. Most PGX studies have been conducted in European populations, but African Americans have greater genetic variation when compared with most populations. Failure to include African Americans in PGX studies may lead to increased health disparities. PGX studies focused on patients of African American descent are needed to identify relevant population specific genetic predictors of drug responses. Recruitment is one barrier to African American participation in PGX. Addressing recruitment challenges is a significant, yet potentially low-cost solution to improve patient accrual and retention. Limited literature exists about African American participation in PGX research, but studies have explored barriers and facilitators among African American participation in genomic studies more broadly. This paper synthesizes the existing literature and extrapolates these findings to PGX studies, with a particular focus on opportunities for message design. Findings from this review can provide guidance for future PGX study recruitment.
Highlights
Precision Medicine (PM) refers to the targeting of therapies according to an individual’s, genetics, lifestyle or environment and holds immense promise to improve population health outcomes (Khoury et al, 2016)
We excluded studies that included less than 13% African Americans as a proportion of the total sample, which is consistent with the proportion of African Americans in the United States population
Even with concerns about trust, African Americans believed their participation in genomic studies was critical
Summary
Precision Medicine (PM) refers to the targeting of therapies according to an individual’s, genetics, lifestyle or environment and holds immense promise to improve population health outcomes (Khoury et al, 2016). Most PGX participants are of European ancestry (Perera et al, 2014). African Americans have greater genetic variation than European populations, results from existing PGX studies may not be as predictive in African Americans and Genomics. African American populations (Johnson et al, 2011; Perera et al, 2014). Under-representation of African American populations impairs the ability to translate PGX findings into clinical care, and will result in increased health disparities (Perera et al, 2014)
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