Nirmala Bhoo Pathy: The disparities in cancer in Southeast Asia

Nirmala Bhoo Pathy, Public Health Physician & Clinical Epidemiologist, made the following post on LinkedIn:

“In our recently published commentary in The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, we highlight the disparities in cancer in Southeast Asia and the need to study these — not only along lines of race/ethnicity, but also people minoritised along lines of sex/gender, socioeconomic status, religion, geography, and others.

On a broader note, my personal call as an epidemiologist to future researchers is that a first step in highlighting disparities in cancer is TO NOT treat important factors such as sex/ gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, geographical region and practice setting as confounders (and adjusting for them!) but as effect modifiers.

Also, there is a need to make a conscious effort to give more attention to presenting descriptive data where results are stratified to allow readers to actually ‘see’ the distribution of health determinants and outcomes across different groups.

After doing the above, you are of course free to indulge in any fancy statistical analysis that you like

Sounds simple right?”

For details click here.
Source: Nirmala Bhoo Pathy/LinkedIn