Guest Blog: Cardiovascular Health and Sexual Identity

From Open Minded Health:

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in the United States. And it’s growing, largely because the factors that lead to CVD are growing too: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diets based on meat, and physical inactivity. We have data on how CVD risk varies depending on sex, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. But we don’t have strong data on how gay, lesbian, and bisexual peoples risk factors add up to actual CVD risk.

CVD risk is often calculated using data from the Framingham study, a massive multigenerational study started back in 1948. The risk calculators that still come from that study today are some of the most well validated calculators we have. A physician can plug in a few numbers and get a good estimate of your risk of having a cardiovascular-related event over the next few years. The calculators are publicly available, but really do need training to interpret.

Why do I bring up the Framingham study? Because the study I’m examining this week uses those same calculators and other factors to try to estimate the cardiovascular risk of lesbian, gay, and bisexual cisgender people. Let’s take a look at what they did!

GUEST BLOG: Article review: Cancer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) populations

From Open Minded Health:

Gender and sexual minority health isn’t just about HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections, and mental health. It’s also about cancers, and our exposures to risk factors for cancers. Why? Because everyone can get cancer, and we all need both preventative and therapeutic health care.

Cancer is not just one disease, which is why it’s been so difficult to “cure”. Cancer is when a cell mutates and grows out of control. The cells begin to invade other tissues, and can spread throughout the body. Any cell can become cancerous. And different cancers are caused by different things and have different treatments.

A recent paper, published online ahead of print, looked at the data surrounding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender/transsexual (LGBT) populations and cancers. They specifically looked at cancers which may be more common in LGBT communities: anal, breast, cervical, colon/rectal, endometrial, lung, and prostate cancers.

Why might these cancers be more common in LGBT communities? Perhaps because of higher levels of risk factors like obesity, smoking, and certain infections. Or perhaps because of lack of preventative health care.

But what do the data say? What data do we even have? So far it looks like we don’t have much information. Most studies about cancers don’t ask about sexual orientation or gender identity. But let’s take the data one cancer type at a time, just as the paper did…