NIH Roadmap Disparities Center
Despite advances in medical care, disparities in pregnancy outcome have persisted for decades. Consistently, infant mortality and low birth weight rates have been at least twice as high for African Americans compared with Whites. African-American mothers are 60% more likely to deliver preterm and have three times the risk of delivering extremely premature babies compared with White mothers, and are three times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes. Why?
In 2004, a diverse and interdisciplinary research team received a National Institutes of Health Roadmap Exploratory Centers P20 grant to transform their collective interest in disparities into true interdisciplinary collaboration. The project, NIH Grant No: 1P20RR020682-01, “Health Disparities: Leaders, Providers, and Patients,” was led by Dr. Scott Ransom, professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Health Management and Policy.
Funding enabled the team to develop new ways to communicate and work across disciplines, generate hypotheses aimed at improving the outcome of pregnancy and explore how to optimally disseminate research-based information. A series of internal symposia and twice-monthly meetings fostered interdisciplinary thinking. In addition, four investigative cores were organized around the leaders’, providers’, woman's life course and information perspectives, and met monthly to develop innovative hypotheses and to design pilot studies.
To integrate and focus our research portfolio, we organized two external symposia in which major scholars and leaders in relevant fields discussed ideas and approaches with Center researchers. This approach yielded four published review papers, several manuscripts, and further pilot work in promising areas. Subsequently, six studies emerged, each highly interdisciplinary and each positing the importance of the social and environmental context for racial/ethnic disparities in pregnancy outcome.
Status
The research teams continue to work on academic papers based on pilot work and several will revise proposals for individual submission. Finally, evaluators of the interdisciplinary process will gather data from the Center experience that will contribute to future interdisciplinary research initiatives.
Publicity about the Center
News-Medical.net and Medical News Today both covered the 2004 NIH award to the University of Michigan.
The Detroit News devoted two issues to a special focus on pregnancy outcome disparities in the Detroit Metropolitan area in December 2004:
