Medicine, genetics and race: the case of cardiovascular diseases.

Abstract

National concern over health disparities in the USA has been expressed for several decades through several Government reports [1]. In response to those reports, the Office of Research on Minority Health was created in 1990 by the Acting Director of the NIH. Since then, a series of initiatives to include minorities in clinical research and increase training of minority health professionals has increasingly focused attention on racial and ethnic disparities in health in the USA. In 1998, the President’s Office set the goal of eliminating disparities by the year 2010 and, 2 years later, Congress enacted The Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education Act of 2000. This legislation resulted in the establishment of the National Center of Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD). As a result of these initiatives, reports documenting racial and ethnic differences in incidence, mortality and severity of disease appear on a regular basis in the biomedical literature [1,2] During this period, other NIH parallel developments were taking place regarding another milestone project: the sequencing of the human genome. In 1989, The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) was originally established as the National Center for Human Genome Research (NCHGR). Its role was to lead the NIH efforts to the Human Genome Project. This mission was completed in 2004 with the publication of the full and complete sequence of the human genome [3]. This accomplishment facilitated the task of