the minority community,” said Dr. James Powell, principal investigator of Project IMPACT (Increase Minority Participation and Awareness in Clinical Trials). The project is a program of the National Medical Association, which represents Black physicians and their patients.
“Mistrust comes up not only [concerning] clinical trials but also with respect to interacting with the medical establishment. This leads to people not seeing a physician when they really need to.”
Black Americans tend to be underrepresented in clinical trials that are responsible for most advances in medicine.
This discrepancy is particularly unfortunate, because not only do Black Americans suffer disproportionately from many health conditions, but they often experience illnesses differently and respond differently to medications, making race-specific trials even more crucial, the researchers noted.
“We’re concerned that the lack of minority representation in clinical trials may perpetuate health disparities,” Powell said.
Previous studies have shown that this under-representation is, in fact, due to individuals’ unwillingness to participate, as opposed to researchers’ exclusion of minorities.
And this unwillingness is widely thought to be due to the legacy of Tuskegee and other such research. The government-sponsored Tuskegee Study, named after a town in Alabama where participants were recruited, enrolled several hundred poor, Black sharecroppers, telling them that they would