Clinical Scholars
In a study published in the July 2012 issue of European Urology, Clinical Scholar Charles Scales, MD, (’11) demonstrated that the number of people with kidney stones in the United States has increased by about 50 percent since the mid-1990s. That study will be referenced in an article in the December issue of Health magazine, which will include Scales’ tips for kidney stone prevention and symptom identification.
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- Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico
- Clinical Scholars
- Cross–Program
- Health & Society Scholars
- Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research
- New Connections
- Nurse Faculty Scholars
- Physician Faculty Scholars
- Scholars in Health Policy Research
Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico
Gabriel Sanchez, PhD, assistant director of the RWJF Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico and an associate professor of political science at the university, co-authored a study, “Tough Times, Tough Choices: The Impact of the Rising Medical Costs on the U.S. Latino Electorate’s Health Care-Seeking Behaviors,’ in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved (November 2012). The authors examined the impact of the rapidly rising costs of health care on the health-seeking behavior of Latino registered voters and the impact of high medical costs on their economic status. The results suggest that the expansion of insurance coverage alone will not insulate the community from economic difficulties, unless the reform policy directly addresses individual costs of care.
Clinical Scholars
Lorraine Kelley-Quon, MD, (’10) presented her study, “Congenital Malformations Associated with Assisted Reproductive Technology: A California Statewide Analysis,” at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) meeting in New Orleans on October 20. The findings included a significant association between the use of assisted reproductive technology, such as certain types of in vitro fertilization, and an increased risk of birth defects.
Lisa Rosenbaum, MD, (’12) published an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine titled, “How Much Would You Give to Save a Dying Bird? Patient Advocacy and Biomedical Research.” The piece addresses the evolving relationship between patient advocates and biomedical research as a “psychological disconnect between the impassioned impulse to save a life in danger and the dispassion required when scientific data must be quantified.” Rosenbaum points to specific examples such as AIDS and breast cancer activism.
Cross-Program
Health & Society Scholars alumna Kathleen Ziol-Guest, PhD, (’06) Investigator in Health Policy Research alumnus Greg Duncan, PhD, (’09) and Clinical Scholars alumnus W. Thomas Boyce, MD, (’77) released a study that examines whether experiencing poverty very early in life is associated with early-onset adult conditions related to immune-mediated chronic diseases. Published in the October 16 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Early Childhood Poverty, Immune-Mediated Disease Processes, and Adult Productivity” finds that children from low-income families are twice as likely to suffer from arthritis and high blood pressure in early adulthood. The health of the adults in the study differed depending on family income between the prenatal year and the second year of life. “Our findings indicate that the incomes of the most economically disadvantaged families should be of greatest concern, particularly during the years when these families have young children,” says Ziol-Guest. The authors note that the study points to the importance of policies that increase financial resources available to families with young children, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and child tax credits. Media coverage of the study included Futurity and the Cornell Chronicle.
Health & Society Scholars
Jason Fletcher, PhD, (’10) recently co-authored a study published in the October 23 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, “How Social and Genetic Factors Predict Friendship Networks,” explores the interaction of broad social structures with genetic factors in explaining complex behaviors such as friendships. The findings suggest that individuals with similar genotypes may not actively select into friendships; rather, they may be placed into these contexts by institutional mechanisms outside of their control. The study was featured on the Smithsonian Institution’s blog, Surprising Science.
Emily Walton, PhD, (’10) published “Resurgent Ethnicity Among Asian Americans: Ethnic Neighborhood Context and Health” in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (September 2012). The study results illuminate the complex ways in which racial and ethnic neighborhood concentration impact health. After investigating the associations of neighborhood socioeconomic and social environments with the health of Asian Americans living in both Asian ethnic neighborhoods and non-Asian neighborhoods, Walton discovered that higher neighborhood education is associated with better self-rated health among Asian Americans who live in Asian ethnic neighborhoods. This correlation, however, does not exist among Asian Americans living in non-Asian neighborhoods. The findings were reported in Outcome Magazine and Dartmouth Now.
Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research
Michael Cohen, PhD, (’06) published a study, “The Earlier the Longer: Disproportionate Time is Spent on Patients Discussed Early in Attending Physician Handoffs” in the Nov. 12 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. The paper finds that even very experienced physicians substantially misallocate the scarce time available for discussing patients at shift change. If replicated—and replication is straightforward and inexpensive—the finding has important implications for the conduct of patient discussions that have been shown to be a major locus of patient safety breakdowns. The study was featured in a Kaiser Health News blog post.
David Jones, MD, PhD, (’07) published a historical analysis, “The Contributions of Prevention and Treatment to the Decline in Cardiovascular Mortality: Lessons From a Forty-Year Debate,” in the October issue of Health Affairs. The article states that though the United States has seen a dramatic reduction in the number of lives lost to cardiovascular disease over the past 40 years, the most effective method of reducing coronary artery disease has not been identified.
Aaron Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH, (’09) published two studies in the October issue of Health Affairs: “Secondary Patenting Of Branded Pharmaceuticals: A Case Study of How Patents on Two HIV Drugs Could Be Extended for Decades” and “The Food and Drug Administration Has the Legal Basis To Restrict Promotion of Flawed Comparative Effectiveness Research.”
New Connections
Thema Bryant-Davis, PhD, (’07) presented on “HIV Prevention Practices Promoted by African American Faith Leaders” at the 2012 American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting and Exposition. Bryant-Davis’ research contributed to the NAACP’s initiative to reframe HIV as a social justice issue. The NAACP released a manual based on her research on the challenges and best practices for talking about HIV in the Black Church.
Hanh Cao Yu, PhD, (’09) presented a session on “Learnings from a Large-Scale, Capacity-Building Initiative of Small, Community-Based Organizations” at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Evaluation Association. Yu was also a discussant on a Think Tank session “Collecting and Using Race and Ethnicity Data: A Promising and Also Perilous Path,” and another session on “Advocacy Capacity-Building in Communities of Color: A Framework and Community Case Studies.”
Nurse Faculty Scholars
Anna Beeber, PhD, RN, (’11) of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, is co-investigator on a new five-year grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research to create and test new tools for individuals who care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The toolkit will help informal caregivers, such as spouses, manage worsening symptoms of the disease, and identify new symptoms to discuss with health care professionals.
Matthew McHugh, PhD, JD, MPH, RN, (’11) of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, has recently published “Nurse-Reported Quality of Care: A Measure of Hospital Quality” in Research in Nursing and Health. The study included more than 16,000 nurses in nearly 400 hospitals in California, Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and examined the relationship between nurses’ reports of quality and hospitals known for nursing excellence.
Diane M. Von Ah, PhD, RN, (’08) assistant professor at the Indiana University (IU) School of Nursing and a researcher at the IU Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center, and colleagues recently published a study, “Advanced Cognitive Training for Breast Cancer Survivors: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” in the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment. The study focused on two different treatments for breast cancer survivors, many of whom report problems with memory and mental fatigue.
Ying Xue, DNSc, RN, (’08) associate professor at the University of Rochester School of Nursing, has published “Supplemental Nurses Are Just As Educated, Slightly Less Experienced, and More Diverse Compared to Permanent Nurses,” in Health Affairs. The study, which compared qualifications and characteristics of supplemental nurses with those of permanent nurses from 1984 to 2008, revealed that supplemental nurses had roughly the same education levels and only slightly less experience than permanent nurses. The supplemental nurse workforce was more diverse racially and ethnically, and more likely to be male. These data show that employing supplemental nurses could help meet the challenges of an aging nursing workforce, the projected future shortage of nurses, and an increasingly diverse U.S. population.
Shannon Zenk, PhD, MPH, RN, (’10) will be part of a University of Illinois at Chicago team that will study policy and environmental factors that influence health behaviors in youth as a part of the ImpacTeen project. The project has been awarded a $4.4 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help identify policies and best practices that have the most potential to address disparities and the childhood obesity epidemic.
Physician Faculty Scholars
Deverick Anderson, MD, MPH, (’09) was quoted in an Associated Press story on a deadly germ, untreatable by most antibiotics, that spread in the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center in 2011. The germ, Klebsiella pneumonia or KPC, resists treatment by one of the last lines of defense: antibiotics called carbapenems. Genetics experts disabled the germ by using its DNA to track its source. Anderson said, “This is really exciting stuff, cutting-edge technology, to try and better understand how these infections get spread.” The story was featured in USA Today online, CBS News online, U.S. News & World Report online, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere.
Ruchi Gupta, MD, MPH, (’09) was featured in a USA Today story about the data she presented at a meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in Anaheim, Calif. in November. Gupta’s presentation described how more than one-quarter of U.S. children with a history of food allergies have outgrown their sensitivities and can tolerate the foods that once made them sick. She is quoted in the story: “Most kids develop tolerance by age 10, but tolerance can develop at any age…. There’s always hope.”
Scholars in Health Policy Research
Rachel Best, PhD, (’12) had a study published in the October issue of the American Sociological Review, “Disease Politics and Medical Research Funding: Three Ways Advocacy Shapes Policy.” The study analyzed 53 diseases over 19 years and found that the way medical research is funded in the United States has been vastly altered by advocates asking that research be focused on particular diseases. Best was also quoted in a Nov. 8 Health Central article, “Why Diabetes Advocacy Has a Problem,” which included a link to her study.
Helen Levy, PhD, (’98) co-authored an article, “The Insurance Value of Medicare,” featured in the Nov. 8 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine online. The article explores cost sharing, proposed reforms to the program, and the impact on Medicare beneficiaries.