African-American women living in underprivileged neighborhoods are not receiving necessary cervical cancer screenings, research indicates.

In a Harvard School of Public Health study, Geetanjali Dabral Datta and colleagues examined the health records of 40,000 African-American women across the United States. They focused their efforts on the frequency of Pap smears used to screen for cervical cancer.

The researchers found that women residing in areas where 20 percent or more of the population lives under the poverty line are less likely to receive regular Pap smears than women residing in areas with fewer than 5 percent of citizens under the poverty line.

Datta says a variety of factors may contribute to the problem. One concern is the lack of health care centers within impoverished neighborhoods. Poorer women do not have the time to commute to doctors' offices in affluent neighborhoods.

"Community outreach programs should focus on high-poverty neighborhoods to decrease the proportion of black women who are not adhering to cervical cancer screening recommendations," Datta says. She says poverty also prevents some women from getting mammograms and screenings for heart disease and diabetes.

This Article is from MyDNA.com

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