The Almanac - Issue No. 1
A new bi-weekly thing I'm offering to paid subscribers. But the first one is on me.
I watched Muss do everything according to her annual copy of the Blum’s Farmer’s and Planter’s Almanac. She’d plant crops in her garden based on the frost dates and moon phases listed. She’d trim my hair to encourage growth and length retention based on information contained within Blum’s pages. It was her version of Google, in a way. Her use of an almanac as a critical information source inspired me to call this new offering from Salt + Yams as such. It’s unlikely that I’ll share anything that will help you know when to plant in your garden or trim your ends—spoiler, hit the salon every three months—but consider this a reading resource for Black health information that’s important to know. When this pops up in your inbox on the second and last Tuesday of every month, I hope you find it as useful as my great-grandmother found her worn copy of Blum’s. Take care.
— Juju
Stat: Study: Black women should start breast cancer screening at age 42
The Gist:
For many years, there’s been considerable debate about the best age for women to initiate breast cancer screening. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that women start getting mammograms at age 50, making individual decisions with their doctors about whether to screen in their 40s. Groups such as the American Cancer Society, meanwhile, recommend screenings begin at an earlier age. Now a large new study suggests that if Black women begin screening for breast cancer at age 42, that could help lower racial disparities in breast cancer deaths.
Breast cancer is slightly less prevalent among Black women in the U.S. compared to white women. But they have a 40% higher risk of dying due to early-onset breast cancer. For that reason, “the current one-size-fits-all policy to screen the entire female population from a certain age may be neither fair nor equitable nor optimal,” researchers write in the study published Wednesday in JAMA Network Open.
The Nutgraf1:
Still, experts caution that, since this study does not use mammogram screening data, basing screening recommendations on its findings is problematic. The authors acknowledge that they were limited by a lack of data for both the mode of cancer detection and past screening history. While the risk level for cancer death is associated with when and how the cancer is detected, the database the researchers used includes a mix of women who didn’t get screened, got screened infrequently, or were screened regularly before being diagnosed, the authors noted.
But since there’s no consensus about breast cancer screening before age 50, conclusions based on breast cancer death before age 50 in Black women, which was the focus of the study, “may not have been substantially affected by this issue,” the authors wrote.
“Even if some Black women had breast cancer screening before age 50, which is quite unlikely, our risk estimates for breast cancer mortality and therefore Black-specific starting age of screening would be under-estimated rather than over-estimated,” Fallah told STAT.
The study’s authors suggest that future clinical trials might investigate whether shifting current breast cancer screening guidelines could change outcomes and reduce harms at the population level. Experts told STAT prospective studies that account for factors like women’s socioeconomic status, ZIP codes, their age, and the frequency of mammogram screenings would provide more solid data.
NYT: Infant Deaths Have Risen for the First Time in 20 Years
The Gist:
The number of American babies who died before their first birthdays rose last year, significantly increasing the nation’s infant mortality rate for the first time in two decades, according to provisional figures released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics.
The spike is a somber manifestation of the state of maternal and child health in the United States. Infant and maternal mortality, inextricably linked, are widely considered to be markers of a society’s overall health, and America’s rates are higher than those in other industrialized countries.
The Nutgraf:
Black infants have the highest mortality rate in the United States, rising slightly last year to 10.86 deaths per 1,000 live births, from 10.55 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2021, an increase that was not statistically significant.
By contrast, the infant mortality rates of both white and Native American and Alaska Native babies increased by statistically significant amounts last year.
MindSite News: ‘She Made Me Feel Seen and Heard.’ Black Doulas Offer Support That Can Help Mom & Improve Birth Outcomes
The Gist:
Doulas like Renois are non-clinical health care workers trained to tend to the physical and emotional needs of women and other birthing people during pregnancy, childbirth and beyond. They’ve been around for centuries – the word comes from the ancient Greek and today means “one who mothers the mother.” In the U.S., they are slowly becoming more widely used, partly as a way to address longstanding inequities that lead to higher rates of premature births, pregnancy complications and maternal deaths among mothers of color.
While the first year after a child’s birth is a time of joy and bonding, it can also be a time of risk: Suicidality is now considered a leading cause of maternal mortality for women in the year after they give birth. Postpartum mood disturbance, although usually mild and short-lived, affects up to 85% of women, with 10-15% experiencing depression and anxiety and 1-2 women per 1000 developing postpartum psychosis.
But doula support not only leads to reduced birth complications and higher rates of breastfeeding, it also boosts new mothers’ mental health. A recent study found that women using doulas had a nearly 65% reduction in odds of developing postpartum depression and/or postpartum anxiety, provided doulas were present during labor and delivery.
Yet doula care is often unaffordable to low-income Black women and other women of color, who have the highest risk of birth-related complications and postpartum mental health conditions. That is starting to shift, as doulas become available in more communities. The Doula Network, an Orlando-headquartered company that provides health plans with credentialed doulas, has expanded doula services and pilots to 11 states.
The Nutgraf:
“Every birthing person deserves to have a doula,” Jerger says simply. “Nobody should birth alone.”
A nutgraf, or “nutshell paragraph,” is journalism jargon that means “sum this up in a nutshell.” So it’s a thesis statement, basically.