OBJECTIVE: The BRCA1/2 mutation status testing is the global standard of care for breast cancer patients with a family history of cancer. BRCA1/2 mutations are known to be ethno-specific. For some ethnic groups of the Northern Asia (Buryats, Yakuts, Altaians, Tuvans, Khakasses, etc.) the founder mutations in the BRCA1/2 genes have not been revealed. This systematic review was conducted to assess the prevalence of BRCA1/2 mutation in breast cancer patients inhabiting Eastern Europe and Northern Asia (or Siberia).
METHODS: A total of 23,561 studies published between 2014 and 2024 were analyzed, of which 55 were included in the review. The literature search was conducted using RusMed, Cyberleninka, Google Scholar, eLibrary, NCBI databases (n=5) and conference papers.
RESULTS: The founder mutations (c.5266dupC and/or c.181T>G) of BRCA1 gene that were frequently observed in the Slav peoples were also identified in Chechens, Armenians, Bashkirs, Ukrainians, Mordovians, Mari, Kabardians, Tatars, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Ossetians, Khanty indigenous peoples and Adygs. For Chechens, Kabardians, Ingush, Buryats, Khakasses, Sakha, Tuvans and Armenians, rare pathogenic variants of the BRCA1/2, ATM, СНЕК2, BRIP1, NBN, PTEN, TP53, PMS1, XPA, LGR4, BRWD1 and PALB2 genes were found. No data are available about the frequency of pathogenic BRCA1/2 mutations for ethnic groups, such as the Udmurts, Komi, Tajiks, Tabasarans, and Nogais indigenous people.
CONCLUSIONS: This is the first systematic review that provides the spectrum of BRCA mutations in ethnic groups of breast cancer patients inhabiting Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It has been shown that the mutations are ethnospecific (varied widely within groups) and not all groups are equally well studied. Further studies on the ethnic specificity of BRCA gene mutations are required.

(1) Current literature on ethnic minorities, comorbidities, and COVID-19 tends to investigate these factors separately, leaving gaps in our understanding about their interactions. Our review seeks to identify a relationship between ethnicity, comorbidities, and severe COVID-19 outcomes (ICU admission and mortality). We hope to enhance our understanding of the various factors that exacerbate COVID-19 severity and mortality in ethnic minorities in Canada and the USA. (2) All articles were received from PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL, and Ovid EMBASE from November 2020 to June 2022. Included articles contain information regarding comorbidities among ethnic minorities in relation to COVID-19 severity and mortality. (3) A total of 59 articles were included that examined various ethnic groups, including Black/African American, Asian, Hispanic, White/Caucasian, and Indigenous people. We found that the most examined comorbidities were diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and chronic kidney disease. A total of 76.9% of the articles (40 out of 52) found a significant association between different races and COVID-19 mortality, whereas 21.2% of the articles (11 out of 52) did not. (4) COVID-19 ICU admissions and mortality affect various ethnic groups differently, with Black patients generally having the most adverse outcomes. These outcomes may also interact with sex and age, though more research is needed assessing these variables together with ethnicity.

BACKGROUND: Dementia as a neurocognitive disorder is becoming increasingly common worldwide, and minority groups are more vulnerable than the general population. Many factors may contribute to their vulnerability such as misconceptions, language barriers, cultural factors, invalid assessment tools, lack of knowledge, or assigning spiritual beliefs to dementia symptoms. Therefore, this scoping literature review aimed to clarify how empirical studies reflect the meaning of dementia, language, and translation among minority ethnic groups.
CONCLUSIONS: The PRISMA extension for the scoping review protocol was used. Thirty-eight studies published in English were reviewed and analysed. The findings revealed that lack of knowledge about dementia and attributing the disease to the normal ageing process were frequent among minority groups. Furthermore, their cultural-specific perspectives and worldviews of wellness and well-being can impact the way dementia is perceived, consequent help-seeking behaviours, or caregiving. Facilitating educational programs to enhance the knowledge and experiences of ethnic communities might be beneficial. Moreover, language is shown to be an important aspect in dementia assessment and participants\' educational level could significantly impact their functional capacity when responding to cognitive measures. Even though there are some useful screening tests, diagnosis barriers might be eased by assessment tool development, modifications, and accurate translations for ethnic communities.
CONCLUSIONS: A promising pathway to support ethnically diverse communities regarding dementia can be raising awareness, providing ethnic-specific services, developing cultural-specific tools to assess dementia or any cognitive impairment by considering perceptions, language, and culture among ethnic groups. Cultural and spiritual considerations could also encourage engagement during assessment.

OBJECTIVE: Discussions of the root causes of health disparities and educational inequities often neglect to identify racism as a primary factor. Researchers must take a systems perspective in order to identify the effects of racism and other forms of systemic oppression on health. It is unclear to what extent this perspective exists in the physical therapy research literature. We conducted a scoping review to quantify and describe the volume of research in physical therapy pertaining to diversity, equity, and inclusion that specifically examines race and/or ethnicity and references racism or antiracism.
METHODS: A systematic search of PubMed and Scopus databases for articles published between 1997 and 2021 was conducted. Articles were screened to ensure they were focused exclusively or primarily on physical therapy and used diversity, equity, and inclusion terms in the context of personal identity factors. This resulted in 158 relevant articles. Each was tagged with an article type and personal identity factor focus.
RESULTS: A majority of the included articles were descriptive/observational in nature. The included articles explored various personal identity factors, with race and ethnicity being the most common focus followed by culture, disability, and socioeconomic status. A small proportion of articles explicitly discussed racism or antiracism.
CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight the need in physical therapy research for greater attention to racism as a fundamental cause of health disparities and educational inequities. Addressing this gap is crucial for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion within the field and ultimately achieving optimal health outcomes for marginalized populations.
CONCLUSIONS: Including consideration of racism and other forms of systemic oppression in the motivation, design, and interpretation of research in physical therapy will help to make more visible the root causes of inequity and improve our ability to develop effective, multi-level interventions.

The American Society of Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR) Professional Practice Committee charged an ASBMR Task Force on Clinical Algorithms for Fracture Risk to review the evidence on whether current approaches for differentiating fracture risk based on race and ethnicity are necessary and valid. To help address these charges, we performed a systematic literature review investigating performance of calculators for predicting incident fractures within and across race and ethnicity groups in middle-aged and older US adults. We included English-language, controlled or prospective cohort studies that enrolled US adults aged >40 years and reported tool performance predicting incident fractures within individual race and ethnicity groups for up to 10 years. From 4838 identified references, six reports met eligibility criteria, all in women. Just three, all from one study, included results in non-white individuals. In these three reports, non-white women experienced relatively few major osteoporotic fractures (MOFs), especially hip fractures, and risk thresholds for predicting fractures in non-white women were derived from risks in the overall, predominantly white study population. One report suggested the Fracture Risk Assessment Tool (FRAX) without bone mineral density (BMD) overestimated hip fracture similarly across race and ethnicity groups (black, Hispanic, American Indian, Asian, white) but overestimated MOF more in non-white than White women. However, these three reports were inconclusive regarding whether discrimination of FRAX or the Garvan calculator without BMD or of FRAX with BMD for MOF or hip fracture differed between white versus black women. This uncertainty was at least partly due to imprecise hip fracture estimates in black women. No reports examined whether ratios of observed to predicted hip fracture risks within each race or ethnicity group varied across levels of predicted hip fracture risk. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of Bone and Mineral Research published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR). This article has been contributed to by U.S. Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA.

The authors of this systematic review examined service utilization and outcomes among youths from ethnoracially minoritized groups after the youths initiated treatment for a psychotic disorder-that is, the youths\' \"pathway through care.\" Also examined were potential moderating variables in pathways through care for these youths at the clinic, family, and cultural levels. The goal was to describe methodologies, summarize relevant findings, highlight knowledge gaps, and propose future research on pathways through care for young persons from ethnoracially minoritized groups who experience early psychosis.
The PubMed, PsycInfo, and Web of Science literature databases were systematically searched for studies published between January 1, 2010, and June 1, 2021. Included articles were from the United States and focused on young people after they initiated treatment for early psychosis. Eighteen studies met inclusion criteria.
Sixteen of the 18 studies were published in the past 5 years, and 11 had an explicit focus on race and ethnicity as defined by the studies\' authors. Studies varied in terminology, outcomes measures, methodologies, and depth of analysis. Being an individual from an ethnoracially minoritized group appeared to affect care utilization and outcomes. Insufficient research was found about potential moderating variables at the clinic, family, and cultural levels.
Studies of pathways through care for persons from minoritized groups warrant further funding and attention.

UNASSIGNED: The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing health disparities. To provide a historical perspective on health disparities for pandemic acute respiratory viruses, we conducted a scoping review of the public health literature of health disparities in influenza outcomes during the 1918, 1957, 1968, and 2009 influenza pandemics.
UNASSIGNED: We searched for articles examining socioeconomic or racial/ethnic disparities in any population, examining any influenza-related outcome (e.g., incidence, hospitalizations, mortality), during the 1918, 1957, 1968, and 2009 influenza pandemics. We conducted a structured search of English-written articles in PubMed supplemented by a snowball of articles meeting inclusion criteria.
UNASSIGNED: A total of 29 articles met inclusion criteria, all but one focusing exclusively on the 1918 or 2009 pandemics. Individuals of low socioeconomic status, or living in low socioeconomic status areas, experienced higher incidence, hospitalizations, and mortality in the 1918 and 2009 pandemics. There were conflicting results regarding racial/ethnic disparities during the 1918 pandemic, with differences in magnitude and direction by outcome, potentially due to issues in data quality by race/ethnicity. Racial/ethnic minorities had generally higher incidence, mortality, and hospitalization rates in the 1957 and 2009 pandemics.
UNASSIGNED: Individuals of low socioeconomic status and racial/ethnic minorities have historically experienced worse influenza outcomes during pandemics. These historical patterns can inform current research to understand disparities in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics.

COVID-19 quickly overwhelmed the world, but disproportionately affects certain communities, particularly minority groups. Despite overrepresentation among COVID-19 cases and death, minority groups were underrepresented in some of the early COVID-19 clinical trials.
To assess and compare the demographic characteristics of COVID-19 clinical trial participants to national COVID-19 data.
PubMed was searched from December 1, 2019 to November 24, 2020, for randomized controlled trials evaluating a pharmacologic treatment for COVID-19 patients from one or more U.S. sites written in the English language following the PRISMA checklist. Descriptive statistics were calculated to characterize patient demographics enrolled in the included clinical trials, as well as for comparison with national COVID-19 data.
A total of 4472 records were identified, of which 16 studies were included. The median number of participants was higher in studies of nonhospitalized patients compared to those of hospitalized patients (n = 452 [range 20-1062] vs n = 243 [152-2795]). Ten (63%) studies reported mean or median ages of 50 years or older among all study arms. Males comprised more than half of the study cohort in ten (63%) studies. Race and ethnicity were reported separately in four (25%) studies but were combined when reported in five (31%) studies, while six (38%) reported only race or ethnicity. Proportional representation based on age, sex, race, and ethnicity was evident in some trials, but not in others, when compared to national data.
Overall, participants often did not reflect the actual population with COVID-19 and demographic characteristics were inconsistently reported.

BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, with significantly worse mortality-related outcomes in ethnic minorities in developed countries. A systematic literature review and meta-analysis of observational studies was conducted to investigate cardiovascular disease-related mortality inequalities between South Asian and White Caucasian ethnic groups.
METHODS: Published studies on mortality between South Asians and Whites in developed countries were retrieved from MEDLINE, PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and grey literature sources (inception-April 2021) and critically appraised using the Quality in Prognosis Studies tool. Bayesian random-effects meta-analyses were performed for both primary and secondary outcomes. Heterogeneity was determined using the I2 statistic.
RESULTS: Of the 9879 studies screened originally, 41 were deemed eligible. A further 3 studies were included via the later search. Of these, 15 reported cardiovascular disease-related mortality, 23 reported all-cause mortality, and 6 reported both. The meta-analysis results showed that South Asians had a significantly increased risk of cardiovascular disease mortality compared to Whites (risk ratio = 1.32; 95% credible interval = 1.14 to 1.54) and a decreased risk of all-cause mortality (risk ratio = 0.95; 95% credible interval = 0.83 to 1.12).
CONCLUSIONS: South Asians had statistically significantly higher odds of cardiovascular disease-related mortality compared to Whites, but not for all-cause mortality. Risk of bias was a serious concern mainly due to a lack of confounders being reported.
BACKGROUND: PROSPERO: CRD42021240865.

UNASSIGNED: Heart failure has high mortality and is linked to substantial burden for patients, carers and health care systems. Patients with chronic heart failure frequently experience recurrent hospitalisations peaking at the end of life, but most prefer to avoid hospital. The drivers of hospitalisations are not well understood.
UNASSIGNED: We aimed to synthesise the evidence on factors associated with all-cause and heart failure hospitalisations of patients with advanced chronic heart failure.
UNASSIGNED: Systematic review of studies quantitatively evaluating factors associated with all-cause or heart failure hospitalisations in adult patients with advanced chronic heart failure.
UNASSIGNED: Five electronic databases were searched from inception to September 2020. Additionally, searches for grey literature, citation searching and hand-searching were performed. We assessed the quality of individual studies using the QualSyst tool. Strength of evidence was determined weighing number, quality and consistency of studies. Findings are reported narratively as pooling was not deemed feasible.
UNASSIGNED: In 54 articles, 68 individual, illness-level, service-level and environmental factors were identified. We found high/moderate strength evidence for specialist palliative or hospice care being associated with reduced risk of all-cause and heart failure hospitalisations, respectively. Based on high strength evidence, we further identified black/non-white ethnicity as a risk factor for all-cause hospitalisations.
UNASSIGNED: Efforts to integrate hospice and specialist palliative services into care may reduce avoidable hospitalisations in advanced heart failure. Inequalities in end-of-life care in terms of race/ethnicity should be addressed. Further research should investigate the causality of the relationships identified here.