What do race and ethnicity mean? The terms "race" and
"ethnicity" can both be used to refer to people of similar
cultural, religious, tribal, or geographic ancestry, yet they
are both notoriously difficult to define. Scientists have called
for using other forms of classification that are more strongly
based in biology.1, 2 Despite these troubled terms, health
disparities do exist along the blurry lines of "racial" or
"ethnic" groups.3, 4 How do doctors classify racial or ethnic
groups? One of the difficulties of tracking health differences
by race is that racial groups are defined in many different
ways. The American Heart Association uses the US government
definition of Hispanics as persons who trace their ancestry to
Spain, Mexico, the Spanish-speaking countries of Central or
South America, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or
other Spanish-speaking cultures, regardless of race. It does not
include people from Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad, Belize,
and Portugal, because Spanish isn't their fir