Flip the Script: Understanding African American Women’s Resilience in the Face of Allostatic Load
African American women have almost double the rates of obesity, diabetes and hypertension compared with white women, resulting in higher mortality rates. Health disparities are complex phenomena that involve different chronic diseases, various racial and ethnic populations, and many conceptual and structural barriers in addition to age, gender, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, and geographic factors. The complexity of the phenomena requires researchers, health educators, clinicians, policy makers and lay-people to use many strategies to study effective ways of reducing health disparities and implementing programs with the ultimate goal of eliminating those disparities.
The goal of this summit is to convene stakeholders to chart a new research path that will consider factors in the lives of African American women that affect their health outcomes. This will be done by building on their resilience to address the ill effects of allostatic load.