New Rochelle, NY, April 15, 2014—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, Transgender Health Disparities: Comparing Full Cohort and Nested Matched Pair Study Designs in a Community Health Center, 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 health measures such as substance abuse, HIV infection, lifetime suicide attempts, and social stressors including violence and discrimination.
"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."