Health Behaviors and Their Risk Factors Among Arab Americans

The five most common chronic health conditions in the United States are heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, accidents, and stroke. Among Arab Americans, chronic health conditions, like diabetes and cancer, have been well documented but work to understand risks for chronic respiratory diseases, accidents, and stroke lags behind that of other minority groups. Risk factors like obesity and tobacco use have been studied extensively, but other risk factors like physical activity and alcohol use have only been examined in narrow subgroups. Most studies examining chronic health conditions and risk factors among Arab Americans have relied heavily on secondary data sources that are conveniently sampled or nonrepresentative of the national Arab American population. Work in this field is limited by an inability to isolate Arab Americans from population-based datasets due to a lack of a racial/ethnic identifier. Future work to better understand chronic disease in this population should aim to gather nationally representative data, compare chronic health conditions across subgroups, and perform intervention studies. Advancing knowledge about Arab American chronic health conditions advances work to reduce health disparities.