Three universities in The University of Texas System announced the awarding of $500,000 for research aimed at preventing diabetes in the Hispanic population.
The Congressional Earmark Funds were awarded to UT Brownsville/Texas Southmost College, UT Health Science Center at Houston, School of Public Health, Brownsville Regional Campus and UT Dallas.
This grant builds on a $7.5 million National Institution of Health award made in 2003, which established a Hispanic Health Research Center in the Rio Grande Valley to study three core areas: obesity, diabetes and cancer.
“One hundred years ago, the probability of someone developing diabetes in our population was probably around five percent,” said Dr. Joseph McCormick, Regional Dean of the UTH School of Public Health and principal investigator of the project. “Two decades ago, the lifetime probability of developing diabetes had risen to about 40 percent. Someone born today has somewhere around a 70-80 percent chance of developing diabetes within their lifetime.”
Researchers are working in the Brownsville community to better understand the disease, and to discover ways to prevent diabetes and some of its effects including cardiovascular disease, anxiety and depression.
“We would all rather see healthy (community members) because somebody started 25 or 30 years ago developing prevention programs and preventing everything from happening in the first place, rather than trying to say, ‘how do we address these issues’ with myriads of renal dialysis programs and other things that are plugging the holes in the dyke, but not really solving the problem,” said Dr. McCormick. “This is part of what our project is about.”
While UTB/TSC and the UTH School of Public Health have been partners in this project for several years, UT Dallas is joining the collaboration, bringing their expertise in geographical information systems to the study.
“The issue of diabetes, the issue of disease hurting humanity is not just in South Texas, it’s all over the world,” said Dr. Da Hsuan Feng, UT Dallas Vice President for Research and Graduate Education. “What better place to begin than here where the disease is real, where there is strong support from the community and we can work with the community, and then scale up to the rest of the world.”
The new funds will enlarge the study group and expand research. The initial grant allowed a small population to be studied and limited the scope of the research.