Chronic disease patients in the Caribbean will be the ultimate beneficiaries of a combined study by Yale University, the University of Puerto Rico, University of the Virgin Islands and The University of the West Indies to investigate the risk factors and prevalence of heart disease, cancer and diabetes in the Eastern Caribbean.
UWI researchers Dr. Peter Adams of the Cave Hill Campus and Dr. Rohan Maharaj of the St. Augustine Campus have been named among the principal investigators in a five-year longitudinal study funded by a US$5.3 million federal research grant.
The grant from the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities will establish the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network (ECHORN), with the coordinating centre based at Yale. ECHORN, which is also partially funded by the Global Health Leadership Institute (GHLI) at Yale, will form research collaborations across the Eastern Caribbean islands of Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
The goal of the study, led by Marcella Nunez Smith, M.D., assistant professor of general internal medicine and assistant director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Programme, is to help improve the health outcomes across the Caribbean region by establishing a cross-island surveillance partnership, while simultaneously increasing research capacity and infrastructure within the Caribbean.
Professor Nunez Smith describes ECHORN as an innovative and timely undertaking, in the face of an increasing burden of chronic disease in the region. “We plan to expand clinical research with racial/ethnic minority populations in a part of the world that is now threatened by an epidemic of non-communicable, chronic diseases. We are fortunate to partner with leading institutions in the region including the University of the Virgin Islands, the University of Puerto Rico, and two campuses of The University of the West Indies to achieve ECHORN’s stated objectives.”
There have been few studies of this kind conducted in the Caribbean and the findings will have direct implications for health policy in the Caribbean region as well as for health inequalities research and policy in the United States. According to Dr. Maharaj, Senior Lecturer – Primary Health Care based at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Mount Hope, the project “has the potential to assist in determining the outcomes of several key medical problems including chronic diseases, mental health and cancers, while allowing comparisons across different ethnic groups, and health care systems.” Dr. Adams, Lecturer in Family Medicine and Deputy Dean at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Cave Hill said “the findings of this project will help in the development of evidence-based interventions and policy specifically designed at improving health outcomes in a Caribbean population. The building of research capacity will help ensure that quality research continues and builds on what this project achieves.”
As the UWI site’s Principal Investigators, Maharaj and Adams will liaise closely with the other Caribbean sites and the Yale coordinating centre to ensure that local nuances are captured, that protocol is adhered to and that there is uniformity in the approach to the collection of data. Data collection is expected to begin by the summer of 2012.