Dr Jill Krissberg on Addressing Racial Disparities in Glomerular Disease

Making sure patients have a strong medical home and close follow-up is one way to reduce glomerular disease disparities among children, said Jill Krissberg, MD, a pediatric nephrology fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Transcript:

What strategies can help prevent socioeconomic consequences of glomerular disease in Black children or more effectively treat the disease in this population?

We acknowledge that this is really just the beginning for this work, but you can start to try to see what are specific areas we could target. So, one could be making sure that they have a strong medical home and close follow-up. Patients who you know are at increased risk of complications, making sure that they are comfortable in managing their disease, strategies to improve medication adherence and accessibility. Sometimes that's where policy can come in to make sure they have good access to medications that patients can afford. There is also the need of, maybe we need to be looking at different, more effective strategies and seeing how our treatments differ across racial/ethnic groups because maybe the effectiveness differs across these groups. We should be treating diseases differently based on other risk factors.

While this cohort was only in pediatrics, you can start to think sometimes about how a child with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, where this disease is going to be chronic, how this could affect them long term. If somebody is already at risk of lower academic achievement and they have a chronic disease that decreases their school success. Then they have difficulty getting higher education, having a steady job, having reliable access to insurance. Then you can kind of see how these things interplay and interplay longitudinally as the disease is on a chronic trajectory.