Table 1.

Definitions of key concepts discussed in this paper

Demographics	Particular characteristics of individuals or populations. These represent a number of physical, social, economic, and administrative domains. Examples include age, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, income, education, home ownership, sexual orientation, marital status, family size, and disability status.[ 38 ]
Social determinants of health (SDoH)	The conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, that influence health outcomes, and the forces and systems that shape them. These forces and systems include economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies, and political systems. They are shaped by the distribution of money, power, and resources at global, national, and local levels.[ 3 , 32 , 34 ]
Race	Any one of the groups that human beings are often divided into based on physical traits or ancestry.[ 30 ] Race is a culturally and politically charged term, for which definitions and meaning are context‐specific. It is related to individual and/or group identity, and is often linked to stereotypes of visible physical attributes such as skin and hair pigmentation.[ 29 ]
Ethnicity	Large groups of people classed according to common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or background.[ 31 ] Ethnicity is used to describe people as belonging to cultural groups, usually on the basis of shared language, traditions, foods, etc. It is often used interchangeably with “race,” and is similarly ambiguous.[ 29 ]
Genetic ancestry	Genetic ancestry refers to the description of the population(s) from which an individual's recent biological ancestors originated, as reflected in the DNA inherited from those ancestors. Genetic ancestry can be estimated via comparison of participants’ genotypes to global reference populations via the set of genetic variants due to differences in allele frequencies between populations. These genetic variants, sometimes called ancestry informative markers, may or may not have biological consequences related to health outcomes, however biological consequences are generally related to variants with Mendelian inheritance patterns that have become prevalent in a population due to founder effects. Different methods of calculating genetic ancestry can yield different results. Genetic ancestry also influences the population distribution of polygenic risk.[ 29 , 39 ]
Cultural ancestry	Cultural ancestry (or cultural heritage in some definitions) refers to the set of shared cultural characteristics within a group of individuals. These may be religious, political, linguistic, or other cultural traits. Deep cultural ancestry, which is the pattern of shared traits which may persist over hundreds or thousands of years, can be assessed using factors like shared linguistics.[ 40 ]
Racism	Racism is “an ideology of racial domination” in which the presumed superiority of one group is used to accrue power and privilege and justify or prescribe the inferior treatment or social position(s) of others. Racism can be institutional, interpersonal, or internalized.[ 41 ]
Discrimination	Discrimination refers to the unequal treatment of individuals or groups based on some demographic characteristic, such as race, sex, religion, etc.[ 35 ]
Disparity	Disparity refers to unequal outcomes achieved or experienced by different demographic groups (e.g., income, home ownership, education, health, etc.).[ 42 ]

These definitions are representative of the current understanding of these concepts at the time of writing. As the general public and academic understanding of these concepts evolves over time, it is important to frame research questions accordingly.