Transcript
Announcer:
This is Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. Today, Dr. John Kingrey will be talking about underrepresented populations in pulmonary arterial hypertension, or PAH, research. Dr. Kingrey is the Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Center at INTEGRIS Health in Oklahoma City. Let’s hear from him now.
Dr. Kingrey:
Pulmonary hypertension has many gaps in understanding. And one of those major gaps is that the predominance of our research has really centered around a population that is not representative regionally—whether it be in the United States, Europe, or Asia—or even globally. We know that the people that we enroll in research trials are not the same snapshot of the overall population of patients with PAH.
And so when you look at our clinical trials, the majority of patients with pulmonary hypertension are White females. We do know that in the idiopathic population and the connective tissue disease population, that certainly would be representative from a gender perspective, but the race is not representative of global PH at large. Specifically, we do not enroll very many African Americans, patients of Asian descent, or patients who are Native Americans. Those populations, certainly, are going to vary from region to region within the United States, but we have, certainly, a lack.
I know at our center, we have a fair amount of Native Americans, being here in Oklahoma. And there are certain barriers that population has in general to getting care, and that doesn't always make it amenable to enrolling those patients in research trials, because we are going to be really more focused on using the tools that we have to try to help improve their health and get them better.
We also have an epidemic in our country of methamphetamine use. And where I practice, I know I have several colleagues in the western part of the United States for whom the most incident population is pulmonary hypertension due to methamphetamine use. Certainly, that is the case with us: about 40 percent of our PAH population is from methamphetamines, and we do not have representation of this group in clinical trials.
That list is certainly not comprehensive. There are other races that are also not adequately represented. And we also include an overwhelming amount of patients with idiopathic PAH relative to the other population. And I'm not sure that really also represents the global burden of disease at large.
Announcer:
That was Dr. John Kingrey discussing how PAH trials fall short in reflecting real-world patients. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
