Dr Nicole Rosendale: Data Lagging in Neurologic Care for LGBTQ+ Individuals

Multiple unknowns are still present in data among LGBTQ+ individuals seeking neurologic care, says Nicole Rosendale, MD, assistant professor of neurology at the University of California San Francisco, neurologist/neurohospitalist.

Transcript

What are some of the greatest health-related neurological needs in the LGBTQ+ community?

I think this is a really important question and one where, unfortunately, we don't have a great answer at this point in time. There's certainly a lot more research that needs to be done. The challenge right now is that because data sources are so limited, not everyone is asking folks their sexual orientation or gender identity in a systematic way. There's a lot that we don't know. I was able to do a scoping review that was published in 2021 that tried to summarize a little bit of the current science of LGBTQ health in neurology, and there was a suggestion that there are certain disparities, particularly in terms of prevalence of certain conditions, such as stroke, for example, and conditions such as functional neurologic disorders, potentially, but there's many, many answers that we don't know and many areas of neurology that still need coverage.