Title: Racial bias is baked into algorithms doctors use to guide treatment
Headings: Racial bias is baked into algorithms doctors use to guide treatment
Racial bias is baked into algorithms doctors use to guide treatment
Heart failure
Kidney donation
Breast cancer
Birth

Content: Heart failure
The Get with the Guidelines–Heart Failure Risk Score, developed by the American Heart Association (AHA), predicts a patient's risk of dying of heart failure in the hospital. A higher score indicates a higher risk of death, so doctors quickly refer patients with higher scores to a cardiologist and may allocate resources to them sooner than patients with lower scores. " Nonblack" patients automatically receive an extra three points on the scale, and therefore, Black patients may be less likely to receive appropriate treatment compared with white patients with the same symptoms and medical history, the authors noted. " The AHA does not provide a rationale for this adjustment," they wrote. Kidney donation
The Kidney Donor Risk Index (KDRI) predicts whether a donated kidney is likely to fail once transplanted, taking the characteristics of the donor, including race, into account. The algorithm ranks kidneys from Black donors as higher risk than those from people of other races, though "the developers of the KDRI do not provide possible explanations for this difference," the authors wrote. Studies now suggest that a specific genetic trait, known as the APOL1 genotype, may explain differences in kidney quality better than race, the authors wrote. Approximately 13% of Black people carry two copies of an APOL1 gene variant associated with increased risk of chronic kidney disease, according to a 2019 report in the journal Circulation. But again, the genotype, not the person's race, best explains this increased risk. By screening for race rather than APOL1 genotype, the KDRI may reduce the number of available kidneys from Black donors, which often go to Black patients, the authors noted.