Poor Patients who are Healthy

Poor Patients Who Are Healthy?
The so-called Latino paradox puzzles medical experts, who seek the answer in diet, lifestyles and support networks.
By Juliet Chung, Times Staff WriterAugust 28, 2006


Thousands of Latino patients stream though the East Los Angeles practice of Dr. Hector Flores and his partners each year.The older ones go to the family practice with arthritis and hypertension, the younger ones with diabetes and asthma.

What surprises Flores, however, is not how sick they are, it is how sick they are not. Overall, Flores said, his patients are much healthier than one would expect given their low levels of income and education, factors epidemiologists long have known are linked to poor health."You can predict in the African American population, for example, a high infant mortality rate," he said recently, "so we would think a [similarly] poor minority would have the same health outcomes."But they don't. They're not there," he said, referring to outcomes among Latinos.

Why Latinos aren't sicker — a phenomenon known to health experts as the Latino paradox — is puzzling to public health experts, given the link between disadvantage and high disease and mortality rates.

To read the rest of the article: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-me-paradox28aug28,0,4731321.story?col