The Burden of Morbidity Among Transgender People

A Health Podyssey

Recent reports suggest about six-tenths of a percent of the United States population, or 1.4 million people, identify as transgender. Transgender individuals are people whose personal and gender identity are different from the gender they were thought to be at birth.

Good information about the health status of this group has been hard to come by although research is growing. Some data come from Medicare, which is useful but not representative of the population as a whole.

Landon Hughes, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, joins A Health Podyssey to discuss a paper he and coauthors published in the September issue of Health Affairs describing the morbidity of privately-insured, transgender individuals as compared to cisgender people, or those whose personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.

Using insurance claims data from 2001 to 2019, Hughes and colleagues report that transgender people were at an overall greater risk for morbidity than their cisgender counterparts across a broad range of conditions.

If you like this interview, order the September issue of Health Affairs.

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