Doctors’ unconscious racial biases may influence their decisions to treat patients and explain racial and ethnic disparities in the use of certain medical procedures, according to Alexander Green from Harvard Medical School and his team. Their study1, published in Springer’s Journal of General Internal Medicine, is the first evidence of how unconscious race bias among doctors affects their clinical decisions.

Far more of today’s heart attack patients receive emergency angioplasty treatment or clot-busting drugs to re-open their clogged heart arteries than even a decade ago, a new study finds.