Abstract IA014: Precision public health approaches to health equity

Abstract

Abstract Since President Barack Obama announced the “Precision Medicine Initiative” during his state of the union address in January 2015, the sciences of precision medicine and health equity have largely grown in parallel, though there have been some efforts to bring the two together. As research on health equity has evolved to name and consider structural racism, the penultimate goal of research in this area also as moved from efforts to identify and describe gaps between racial and ethnic groups to characterizing the context creates and perpetuates racial inequities and how best to mitigate them. In this presentation, I will briefly describe how syndemics, intersectionality, and individual tailoring may complement downstream efforts to characterize epigenetic and genomic efforts to develop biomedical interventions to achieve healthcare equity and health equity. After noting how the principles of precision medicine may be applied more broadly than the most common way it is operationalized through genomic medicine, I argue that that creating racial justice in health will require defining health equity more clearly and precisely. Consequently, I utilize the example of Black men and the context of COVID-19 to highlight how more precisely defining the structural context of the population of interest by using tools such as intersectionality and syndemics is fundamental to achieving equity. I highlight how achieving health equity will require creating, resisting, undoing, and mitigating structural racism and note what that means for cancer research. Precision medicine may help to mitigate the health effects of structural racism, and it will remain an important tool to promote population health; however, efforts to achieve health equity and racial justice will require interventions that change the contexts and conditions that create, exacerbate, and perpetuate structural inequities and the racial inequities in health outcomes that they produce and maintain. Citation Format: Derek M. Griffith. Precision public health approaches to health equity. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference: Precision Prevention, Early Detection, and Interception of Cancer; 2022 Nov 17-19; Austin, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Can Prev Res 2023;16(1 Suppl): Abstract nr IA014.