BACKGROUND The rate of mortality increase with age among adults is typically used as a measure of the rate of functional decline associated with aging or senescence. While black and white populations differ in the level of mortality, mortality also rises less rapidly with age for blacks than for whites, leading to the well-known black/white mortality "crossover". OBJECTIVE This paper investig...

Breast cancer continues to be the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the second leading cause of cancer deaths among U.S. women (1). Compared with white women, black women historically have had lower rates of breast cancer incidence and, beginning in the 1980s, higher death rates (1). This report examines age-specific black-white disparities in breast cancer incidence during 1999-2013 and morta...

Among black women aged 45–54 years, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) disease death rate decreased 60% from 28.4 per 100,000 in 2006 to 11.5 in 2015. Among black women aged 55–64 years, the rate increased 42% from 10.0 in 2000 to 14.2 in 2008, before declining to 10.3 in 2015. Among white women aged 45–54 years, the rate decreased 53% from 1.9 in 2005 to 0.9 in 2015. Among white women aged...

Recent research has shown that preexisting health condition affected an individual's risk of dying during the 14th-century Black Death. However, a previous study of the effect of adult stature on risk of mortality during the epidemic failed to find a relationship between the two; this result is perhaps surprising given the well-documented inverse association between stature and mortality in hum...

AIM To investigate, with extended follow-up, cause-specific mortality among low-income Black and White Americans with Type 2 diabetes who have similar socio-economic status. METHODS Black and White Americans aged 40-79 years with Type 2 diabetes (n = 12 498) were recruited from community health centres as part of the Southern Community Cohort Study. Multivariable Cox analysis was used to esti...

PURPOSE We compared mortality rates among state prisoners and other state residents to identify prisoners' health care needs. METHODS We linked North Carolina prison records with state death records for 1995-2005 to estimate all-cause and cause-specific death rates among black and white male prisoners ages 20-79 years and used standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) to compare these observed dea...