Volume
8: No. 1, January 2011
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
A Conversation with Michael
Tjepkema, Senior Research Analyst at Statistics Canada
00:00:00
Fran Kritz: I’m Fran Kritz, senior editor at Home Front Communications
in Washington, DC. We’re speaking today with Michael Tjepkema, senior research
analyst at Statistics Canada. Dr. Tjepkema has written a very interesting
article for the December 2010 issue of Chronic Diseases in Canada. For
this issue, there is a joint publishing initiative between Preventing Chronic
Disease, a publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in
Atlanta, and Chronic Diseases in Canada. Dr. Tjepkema’s article looks
at mortality rates among Aboriginal adults living in urban areas in Canada. Dr.
Tjepkema, welcome.
00:00:36
Dr. Michael Tjepkema: Hello, Fran.
00:00:38
Kritz: Thanks so much for speaking with us today. Let me ask you
a little bit about your study. First of all, what was the time frame of it?
00:00:45
Tjepkema: The time frame is, we examined a cohort of Aboriginal
adults based on our 1991 census that were aged 25 and older and we tracked their
mortality from June of that year up until December 31, 2001.
00:01:01
Kritz: And the time frame, even though it’s about, the data ended
about 10 years ago, it’s important that we look at it now. Why is that?
00:01:09
Tjepkema: It’s very important because this study fills an
important data gap because we do not know the mortality outcomes for Aboriginal
people living in urban Canada, so the fact that we were able to provide estimates
fills an important information gap and even though that the data does only
go until 2001, many of these mortality rates, many of our findings would
still be relevant to today.
00:01:39
Kritz: Now your study found a higher rate of premature death
among urban Aboriginal adults than among urban non-Aboriginal adults. What did
you find, what accounted for that?
00:01:49
Tjepkema: There are many reasons why the Aboriginal adults would
have a higher mortality rate. We did examine socioeconomic characteristics such
as income, educational attainment, lone parent status, whether someone worked or
not, and all these variables together we found accounted for about almost
two-thirds of the excess mortality among Aboriginal men and about one-third for
Aboriginal women. So this study stresses the importance of the social
determinants of health.
00:2:31
Kritz: There seem to be some similarities between some causes of
premature death among this group and similar groups in the United States.
Factors such as suicide, certain types of cancer, cardiovascular disease. Have
you looked at doing a comparison study between the 2 nations?
00:02:46
Tjepkema: I haven’t done a comparison study between the two
nations, but it’s true that a lot of these causes of death that you mentioned
cardiovascular disease and cancer, specifically lung cancer, and injuries both
unintentional and intentional, do drive a lot of this disparity in mortality
between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.
00:03:10
Kritz: The full issue of Chronic Diseases in Canada looked at various health issues and determinants among Aboriginal adults and
seems to culminate in the fact that there is this rate of premature death. How
do you think they might use this data going forward?
00:03:22
Tjepkema: Well, we do hope that our study results are used by
program areas both within government departments and among Aboriginal
organizations. But, because of my position within my organization, we don’t
actually advocate policy change, but we do provide information such as this that
can be used to create and target programs to help reduce some of this disparity and
premature mortality.
00:03:52
Kritz: One of the things that I thought, was a look at how the
statistics were used. And so what I saw in your article was, looking at, tell me
if I got this correct, looking at age 25, how many years left of life was
projected. Did I understand that correctly?
00:04:09
Tjepkema: That is correct, we did examine remaining years of life at age 25
and this is, you know, kind of a basic fundamental indicator of the health of a population. And our results do clearly show that Aboriginal
men living in urban Canada were expected to live 4.7 years shorter than other
non-Aboriginal men, and the gap was even larger when we examined the results for
women, Aboriginal women were 6.3 years shorter.
00:04:44
Kritz: Finally, Dr. Tjepkema, are you doing any research in this
area right now?
00:04:47
Tjepkema: Yes we are. We are using the same database and examining
disparities looking at cardiovascular disease mortality and getting to the more
specifics, and I focus on the North American Indian population, which is one of
our 3 Aboriginal groups in Canada. Also, I have some stuff coming out on the
potential years of life lost before the age of 75, which kind of ties into the
premature mortality that we found among, in this paper. So there is some
research that is ongoing and in terms of the future, we do plan to examine
differences among cancer incidence among Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.
00:05:35
Kritz: Dr. Michael Tjepkema, senior research analyst in the
health analysis division at Statistics Canada, this is really very striking
research and we’ll look forward to following up with you, to see where your
study of this population takes you in the next few years. Thank you so much for
speaking with us.
00:05:42
Tjepkema: You’re welcome.
00:05:51
Kritz: In Washington, DC, I’m Fran Kritz for Home Front
Communications.
00:05:57
END
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