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Purpose: In the United States, Black females are burdened by more aggressive subtypes and increased mortality from breast cancer compared to non-Hispanic (NH) White females. Institutional racism may contribute to these inequities. We aimed to characterize the association between home mortgage discrimination, a novel measure of institutional racism, and incidence of Luminal A and triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) subtypes among NH Black and NH White females in California metropolitan areas. Methods: We merged data from the California Cancer Registry on females aged 20 + diagnosed with primary invasive breast cancer between 2006 and 2015 with a census tract-level index of home mortgage lending bias measuring the odds of mortgage loan denial for Black versus White applicants, generated from the 2007–2013 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database. Poisson regression estimated cross-sectional associations of census tract-level racial bias in mortgage lending with race/ethnicity- and Luminal A and TNBC-specific incidence rate ratios, adjusting for neighborhood confounders. Results: We identified n = 102,853 cases of Luminal A and n = 15,528 cases of TNBC over the study period. Compared to NH Whites, NH Black females had higher rates of TNBC, lower rates of Luminal A breast cancer, and lived in census tracts with less racial bias in home mortgage lending. There was no evidence of association between neighborhood racial bias in mortgage lending at the time of diagnosis and either subtype among either racial/ethnic group. Conclusion: Future research should incorporate residential history data with measures of institutional racism to improve estimation and inform policy interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Safe Passage" is an after‐school intervention program for disadvantaged youth in a medium‐sized city in southern California. Led by local law enforcement, as well as the city's recreation and park department, the program's goal is to combine community policing with after‐school care and tutoring to support children living in a large apartment complex with the highest rates of gang membership and crime in the city. This is an exploratory study that examines the perspectives of various stakeholders in the intervention program, including the community members, the local police, and Safe Passage staff members. Survey data from the community residents, program staff and law enforcement were collected. Findings indicate that there was some consensus across the various subpopulations on the challenges that have had the largest negative influence on youth in the community. The local police and the community members surveyed were also in agreement that police/community relations were largely positive. All stakeholders surveyed felt generally positive about the intervention program, but the community members were more skeptical of the program's ability to deter their children from trouble. Implications of our findings for the program and for future studies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In recent decades there has been an increasing interest in understanding the role of social and physical contexts in influencing health behaviors and outcomes. This is especially true for weight, which is considered to be highly dependent on environmental factors. The evidence linking neighborhood characteristics to weight in the United States, however, is mixed. Many studies in this area are hampered by cross sectional designs and a limited scope, insofar as they investigate only one dimension of neighborhood context. It is also unclear to what extent neighborhood characteristics account for racial/ethnic disparities in weight. Using longitudinal data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A. FANS), we compare patterns of weight change between Hispanics and other racial and ethnic groups in order to evaluate whether we observe a pattern of unhealthy assimilation in weight among Hispanic immigrants and to identify differences in the rate at which different groups gain weight over time. We also explore the extent to which patterns of weight change are related to a wider range of community characteristics. We find that weight increases across all groups between the two study waves of L.A. FANS and that the increases are significant except for Asians/Pacific Islanders. With respect to differences in the pace of weight change, second and higher generation Hispanic women and black men gain weight more rapidly than their first generation Hispanic counterparts. Although the evidence presented indicates that first generation Hispanics gain weight, we do not find evidence for convergence in weight since the U.S.-born gain weight at a more rapid rate. The inclusion of community-level variables does not alter the relationships between the race, ethnicity, and immigrant generation categories and weight change. Of the six types of community characteristics considered, only collective efficacy is consistently and significantly associated with weight change, although the protective effect of neighborhood collective efficacy is seen only among women. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]