Advancing Racial/Ethnic Minority Men's Health Using a Life Course Approach.

Marked disparities in health indicators exist between White men and racial/ethnic minority men in the United States. These disparities begin early in life and persist through the life course until advanced ages. Not only do minority men have poor outcomes across a broad variety of health conditions when compared with White men, but they are also less likely to interact and engage with the health care system.1-4 Although there is a burgeoning body of literature on men’s health, the literature has only a paucity of research focused specifically on the health of minority men. Moreover, advancing the study of men’s health disparities requires a shift from merely documenting betweengroup differences to understanding variations in pathways through environmental, sociocultural, behavioral, psychosocial, and biological factors that create and sustain health disparities for minority men.1,5,6 It is well-documented that minority males in the United States experience life differently from infancy onward compared with White men, largely due to social and structural inequalities at all stages of life.3 Beyond exposure to risks that have a direct and immediate effect on health (eg, HIV status, homicide), the primary pathway to adverse health among minority men is through social disadvantages and stressors that accumulate over the life course beginning at early ages. These stressors compromise physiological systems and lead to early onset of age-related diseases and premature mortality. For this reason, scholars seeking to advance the field must consider minority men’s health in a life course framework. Nearly two decades of health research has utilized life course perspectives and theories that provide some indication of influences on health via socioeconomic status, health behaviors, and labor market outcomes such as unemployment, underemployment, and work conditions, but this scholarship has been noticeably silent on the topic of minority men’s health.1,7-9 A critical next step is to test prevailing life course hypotheses on minority men’s health and health disparities specifically. We may then ultimately be able to identify and prevent or treat mechanisms that lead to the reduction of premature mortality and improvement of the lives of minority men. A better understanding of how and why racial/ethnic disparities emerge among younger men is required to develop strategies and policy-relevant solutions that can attenuate/eliminate disparities among men of all age groups. A life course perspective offers three key features that are important in understanding minority men’s health: 1) the opportunity to identify positive or negative cumulative experiences and examine the impact of those experiences on health outcomes; 2) the timing of significant AdvAncing RAciAl/Ethnic MinoRity MEn’s hEAlth Using A lifE coURsE AppRoAch