ANN ARBOR, MI - The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued grants totaling $60.5 million over five years to create eight Centers for Population Health and Health Disparities, designed to support cutting-edge research to understand and reduce differences in health outcomes, access and care.

One of the eight centers will be led by researchers at the University of Michigan Health System and Ohio State University. The $1.455 million National Cancer Institute grant will fund efforts to increase early detection of cervical cancer in Appalachian women.

" Cancer is an important health issue in underserved populations," says Mack Ruffin, M.D., associate professor of family medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and one of the researchers involved in the new center. "The center will initially focus on the goal of understanding why high rates of cervical cancer are found in Appalachian Ohio, a mainly rural area in Southern and Eastern Ohio."

Four institutes or offices within the National Institutes of Health -- the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Aging and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research -- will support this transdisciplinary research to examine how the social and physical environment, behavioral factors, and biologic pathways interact to determine health and disease in populations.

The grants address recommendations of recent reports from the National Academy of Sciences, calling for integrated research in the natural, behavioral and social sciences to create a more comprehensive understanding of disease pathways. The reports also stressed the need to examine causation and intervention at the population and environmental levels, rather than solely at the individual level.

" This initiative is an exciting step toward understanding and eliminating health disparities for numerous diseases throughout the United States," says HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson.

The eight centers will form a network of research teams to explore the complexity of health disparities. Investigators will follow a community-based research approach that involves community stakeholders in the planning and implementation of research. Studies will focus on obesity, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer, mental health, gene-environment interactions, and psychosocial stress.

Other Centers for Population Health and Health Disparities will be located at RAND Corp., Tufts University and Northeaster University, University of Chicago and University of Ibadan in Nigeria, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas Medical Branch, and Wayne State University.

Contact:
UMHS: Nicole Fawcett, (734) 764-2220
or NCI: Nicole Gottlieb, (301) 496-6641

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