Georgia State receives $6.7 million grant for research center in health disparities

The National Institutes of Health has awarded Georgia State University with a five-year grant to start a new Center for Excellence in Health Disparities Research, which will investigate health disparity issues in Atlanta’s urban environment.

The $6.7 million grant is funded through the NIH’s National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities. The center will include major research topics, as well as outreach programs.

The new center will be based in the Institute of Public Health of the College of Health and Human Sciences, and will include researchers from public health, social work, the Center for Healthy Development and criminal justice in the college, and faculty from the departments of African-American studies, sociology, and psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Health disparities in urban areas lead to poor health, which is caused by a confluence of factors, including poverty, discrimination, unemployment, lack of access to care and the manmade environment, said Michael Eriksen, director of the Institute of Public Health.

“These factors conspire to put communities at a disadvantage in terms of health and well-being,” Eriksen said. “What we hope to do with this new, larger center of excellence is to better understand the socioeconomic forces that contribute to ill health in communities that constitute much of urban Atlanta, and the urban United States.”

Three major research areas include:

    • Investigating variations in health among disadvantaged neighborhoods, especially in the wake of Atlanta’s relocation of residents traditional public housing, undertaken by Erin Ruel, assistant professor of sociology

    • Examining the role of religion and churches in reducing drug use and the transmission of HIV, researched by professor Richard Rothenberg of the Institute of Public Health

    • Testing the use of a way to reduce child maltreatment, called the SafeCare Model from the Center for Healthy Development, by using computers; researched by associate professor Shannon Self-Brown of the center.

The university, through its Partnership for Urban Health Research, has been working in the field for several years, and faculty have built relationships with local neighborhoods, especially relationships with the communities of Neighborhood Planning Unit-V, located near Turner Field.

The new center will allow these relationships to continue and help to benefit the community over the long term, Eriksen said.

“It all starts with developing relationships with the community,” he said. “The problem historically has been that universities will get funding for a certain project, go into the community and do the project, and then the community never hears from them again. There needs to be a trusting and sustained relationship, which we’ve established.”

The center’s community work will also involve partnerships with local non-profit organizations, churches and other faith-based organizations, housing organizations and others to collect data, analyze patterns and to perform interventions, especially in the case with the computer-assisted SafeCare project to see if problems can be prevented in the future, Eriksen said.

The grant will also fund several core areas for infrastructure, including administration, research and training for GSU students, faculty and the community, as well as a community outreach area.

Eriksen also said that the center will serve as a repository of data for health and safety in the metro Atlanta area, which researchers plan to use in conjunction with the new visualization wall at the Parker H. Petit Science Center. The wall consists of a large, 200-million pixel array of computer screens, filling up a room to allow researchers to view and analyze volumes of visual information.

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GSU researchers to investigate oil-degrading microbes in the wake of Gulf oil spill

Georgia State University researchers will head to Louisiana this fall to see if clay minerals can be used to aid microbes to better break down oil in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The research in the salt marshes is sponsored by a one-year, $61,537 Rapid Research Response (RAPID) grant from the National Science Foundation.

The research team includes Daniel Deocampo, W. Crawford Elliott, Larry Kiage, Eirik Krogstad and Seth Rose of the Department of Geosciences; Kuki Chin of the Department of Biology; and Gary Hastings of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

"Anytime we can shave off the timeline for ecological restoration of the Gulf coast will have tangible economic and ecological impacts," said Daniel Deocampo, assistant professor of geosciences.

Georgia State researchers will select three experimental plots in the marshes. They will then spray the clay minerals, which occur there naturally, over the plots. Chunks of sediment and seawater will be taken back to the GSU lab in Atlanta for further analysis.

Deocampo said that the team will hopefully have preliminary data by spring 2011 - a quick turnaround for research.

The microbes that exist in the marshes have evolved over time to be able to ingest oil, as oil naturally seeps out of sediments in the Gulf of Mexico - albeit in significantly smaller amounts than the recent oil spill, said Kuki Chin, assistant professor of microbiology.

"So in this case, when the oil comes, it can be used as a food source," Chin said. "Some microbes can degrade sulfate as well as petroleum hydrocarbon."

There are thousands of species of microbes which can eat up oil, some existing on the surface of the water that are aerobic, meaning they rely on oxygen to live. Others existing in deeper sediment layers on the marshes are anaerobic and can live without oxygen.

What scientists don't know is the exact mechanism that encourages microbes to consume petroleum hydrocarbons, Deocampo said. In the lab, the application of clay minerals, particularly one called calcium montmorillonite, seems to encourage aerobic bacteria to consume more hydrocarbons.

"Clay minerals are really unique among minerals because they have a really high, natural electrical charge," he explained. "That charge has to be balanced somehow, and has to be balanced by magnesium or calcium in sea water."

But this can change, where particles called cations that carry the charge can go back and forth, depending on chemical reactions.

"The hypothesis is that when you have this charged surface with these cations on it, and put that right next to a cell wall of one of these microbes, the charged surfaces help the microbe to gain nutrients," Deocampo said.

Researchers will also test to see if the process functions in anaerobic bacteria in the same way as aerobic bacteria.

Chin said that environmental conditions could play a factor in how the microbes react in the Deepwater Horizon spill, causing a different reaction that the one which occurred during the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.

"Environmental conditions, such as the temperature, can make a difference. We hope that in the marshes, the reactions could be quicker," she said.

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Adolescents who think that they are overweight are at increased risk of suicide attempts

Multiple social factors, including discrimination and harassment, may contribute to an increased risk of suicidal feelings among adolescents who feel that they are overweight, a Georgia State University researcher says.

Monica Swahn, associate professor in the institute of public health, and her students found that adolescents who perceive that they overweight -- even though they are not, according to their body mass index -- are at increased risk for suicide attempt, according to a recently published study in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

"We were surprised to find that any combination of perception of being overweight, or actually being overweight, increased the risk of suicidality," Swahn said.

Swahn and students in her social determinants of health class analyzed data from the National Youth Risk Behavior Study from the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention. Further studies are needed to look at multiple factors related to suicidal feelings, but social structures including discrimination, harassment, income, housing, food and nutrition, and media messages likely play a role in the increased risk for suicide attempts among youth who feel that they are overweight.

"There is an ideal about what a body should look like, which we're all inundated with constantly," Swahn said. "And children and youth are very vulnerable to these messages as they transition into adulthood."

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