Wayne State was recently one of seven universities awarded a $5.7 million grant for research into black adolescent obesity. from the National Institutes of Health.
According to Dr. Susan Czajkowski of the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, a division of the NIH, WSU replied to a request for applications sent out from the institute.
A peer review board “gave Wayne State University’s application a priority score that placed it in the top-scoring set of applications, of which seven were able to be funded,” Czajkowski said.
Wayne State’s School of Medicine and Dr. Sylvie Naar-King will lead the project.
“WSU was picked because of the quality of the research, quality of the science and the quality of the team,” said Naar-King, associate professor of pediatrics in WSU’s School of Medicine.
According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, between 16 and 33 percent of children and adolescents are obese. The WSU project, “Interventionist Procedures for Adherence to Weight Loss Recommendations in Black Adolescents,” will differ from those in the past. This time it will go beyond just developing food and exercise plans, Naar-King said.
“We don’t need any more of those,” she said.
There are so many different factors in each child’s life, Naar-King said. In some cases there are simply no places to exercises or places to shop for groceries, or the child has low self-esteem or suffers from depression.
Parents are another factor. Many have to work day and night in order to feed their kids and do not have the time to monitor their eating, Naar-King said.
“Some of them don’t know how to cook healthy food,” she said. “All these different factors are different for each family.”
The project will be composed of three separate strategies: intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and skill building.
“We are trying to use family counselors to take the practices out into the targeted areas,” Naar-King said.
By doing so, the researchers hope counselors will work with parents and their children in the home — practicing healthy habits in the setting they live in, she said.
Naar-King will be joined by Dr. Kai-Lin Catherine Jen, department chair of nutrition and food science in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, nine other department and institutes from the university and a consultant from the Medical University of South Carolina.
The research will involve 58 families at the beginning of 2010 and will increase to 200 families by the end of that year. They will be recruited from Children’s Hospital of Michigan, Adolescent Medicinal Clinic and General Pediatrics Clinic, the new Health and Fitness Clinic at CHM Pediatrics, Endocrinology Clinic and other community centers.
Kelli Barrett contributed to this article.
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