Friday, July 21, 2023

Androgen and survival advantages in African Americans

Another hypothesis on genetic difference in African Americans that offered a survival advantage during the passage from Africa... 

"... slaves possessing more responsive androgen receptors experienced a survival advantage engendered by the enhanced anabolic effects which accrued such as increased red cell mass and therefore greater oxygen carrying capacity and tissue oxygen delivery enabling these slaves to tolerate stifling conditions in the hull of the slave ship..."

"African-Americans having the highest prostate cancer incidence rate and the Caribbean having the highest prostate cancer mortality rates in the world are consistent with this hypothesis as is the observation that the 10 fastest men and 9 fastest women of all time are exclusively the descendants of West African slaves who survived the middle passage." 



However, to quote a related editorial, 
"even if African-Americans were genetically [different]... It is not possible to categorize an entire racial group as being genetically or physiologically distinct from one another because of the vast genetic heterogeneity of our populations."

"Overcoming this bias and refusing to treat African-Americans as a genetically homogenous group is critical for our nation's health because minorities receive less and lower quality healthcare than do Caucasians...we should reject the premise of genetic determinism and essential black abnormality and not think of racial groups as fundamentally distinct in terms of biology or physiology."

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/advan.00070.2018

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