A new study offers a glimpse at how direct-to-consumer pharmacy pricing could one day present stiff competition to the private prescription drug insurance model, researchers say.

A new analysis from UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and the Latina Futures 2050 Lab shows disparities in pay for Latinas across California. Overall, Latinas in California receive 49 cents for every dollar earned by non-Hispanic white men. In some of California’s wealthiest counties, Latinas tend to experience an extreme wage gap when compared to non-Hispanic white men. In San Mateo, Santa Clara and Marin counties, where median household incomes are above $100,000, Latinas earn just 38, 37 and 34 cents per dollar, respectively.  This latest data is part of the Latina Wage Gap Disparities Across California counties report, co-authored by Veronica Terriquez, director of the center and co-founder of its Latina Futures 2050 Lab initiative. “On this Latina Equal Pay Day, it is important to drive this message: we cannot ignore existing pay gaps endured by Latinas—the largest ethnic racial group among California’s female workers,” Terriquez said.

In a sweeping study published today in Nature, researchers at UC Berkeley Haas, Stanford, and Oxford/Autonomy Univerisity documented extensive age and gender distortion across online media—and found that common algorithms are amplifying the bias.

New research examines overconfidence among tournament chess players to investigate if it is prevalent in an environment that should discourage it. 

The prevalence of Alzheimer disease (AD) is approximately two times higher in African Americans (AA) compared to White/European-ancestry (EA) individuals living in the U.S. Some of this is due to social determinants of health such as disparities in health care access and quality of education, biases in testing and higher rates of AD risk factors such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes in those who identify as African American.

 

Although many studies have examined differences in gene expression (measure of the amount of protein encoded by a gene) in brain tissue from AD cases and controls in EA or mixed ancestry cohorts, the number of AA individuals in these studies was unspecified or too small to identify significant findings within this group alone.

 

In the largest AD study conducted in brain tissue from AA donors, researchers from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine have identified many genes, a large portion of which had not previously been implicated in AD by other genetic studies, to be significantly more or less active in tissue from AD cases compared to controls. The most notable finding was a 1.5 fold higher level of expression of the ADAMTS2 gene in brain tissue from those with autopsy-confirmed AD.