|
|
| HOME |
| |
BOOKMARK
 Favorites  Digg  Del.icio.us  Facebook  Furl  Magnolia  StumbleUpon  Google  Yahoo MyWeb
|
|
|
|
|
Viewing 1 - 5 out of 5 Blogs.
I just posted Frank's soul-bearing facebook post in forums because I think his post is great jumping point for further discussion, progress, advocacy, and activism.
Planning on re-formatting and putting up as a Bulletin and Blog, but for now...go check out the Forums section. There's tons of great stuff up there and we want to hear from you! Granted, I cannot speak for the whole group, but I know I want to know what all of you are thinking. I am willing to share too. Ask me anything you like. Why do I post at least once a week, ideally more? Why am I so involved? Do I have mental health disorders or am I just an ally? I've got class tomorrow, so I should catch some z's but looking forward to getting to know all of you better over the web and meeting you as NKM2 has more events nationwide and internationally.
Start sending good vibes to the team bringing the NKM2 cause to Iraq! They're so great! Goodnight moon. Goodnight room. Goodnight roomie. Hello sweet dreams.
Tags: Frank Eannarino Removing The Stigma Forums
UIC News Release
University of Illinois at Chicago Office of Public Affairs (MC 288)
601 S. Morgan St., Chicago, IL 60607-7113, (312) 996-3456, www.news.uic.edu
Release Date:
August 4, 2009
Media Contact:
Sherri McGinnis González, (312) 996-8277, smcginn@uic.edu
$7M Grant Establishes New UIC Center to Eliminate Health Disparities
The University of Illinois at Chicago has been awarded a $7.2 million federal grant to establish the UIC Center of Excellence in Eliminating Health Disparities.
The new center, funded by a five-year grant from the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health, will focus on health disparities in prostate and colorectal cancer, community-based breast cancer initiatives, and training and educating the next generation of health disparities researchers.
"The new center will be a multi-faceted, university-wide resource to integrate health disparities research and activities," said Elizabeth Calhoun, associate professor of health policy and administration at the UIC School of Public Health, and director and principal investigator of the new center. "We plan to engage new investigators in health disparities, reaching not only into our undergrad and graduate populations, but even into high school, to build a pipeline of researchers interested in health disparities."
Carol Ferrans, professor and associate dean for research at the UIC College of Nursing, is co-director of the center.
Researchers at the center will build upon prior UIC research to implement a community project to eliminate breast cancer disparities in South Side Chicago communities disproportionately affected by high rates of breast cancer deaths. The project will use culturally sensitive messages to promote mammography screening, address beliefs that contribute to screening reluctance, and address personal and health system barriers to screening.
The center's primary research projects will specifically look at disparities in prostate and colorectal cancer.
Colorectal cancer is the second most common cancer among African-American women and the third most common for African-American men. Late stage diagnosis, method of detection, delays from detection to surgical intervention, and disparities in treatment may all contribute to African Americans having the highest mortality from this disease of any racial or ethnic group, according to researchers.
In one study, led by Garth Rauscher, UIC assistant professor of epidemiology, researchers will enroll 500 African-American patients newly diagnosed with colorectal cancer to obtain information about screening, stage at diagnosis and treatment. The researchers will look at personal barriers such as cultural beliefs about cancer, social support, transportation, housing, literacy, perceived stress, fear, medical trust, as well as access barriers such as insurance status.
A second study, led by Vince Freeman, UIC assistant professor of epidemiology, will compile data on prostate and colorectal cancer cases diagnosed between 1995 and 2008 in Chicago to conduct a population-based analysis of clinical, socioeconomic and health care factors that account for mortality differences between African Americans and Caucasians.
Ultimately, these statistical models will allow researchers to predict hot-spot areas heavily burdened with disease, said Calhoun, and provide effective measures for deploying resources such as targeted cancer screenings.
The center has a research core, a training and education core, and a community engagement core, led by Richard Warnecke, Faith Davis, and Carol Ferrans, respectively, who are researchers at the UIC Institute for Health Research and Policy.
Rauscher and Freeman are researchers at the UIC Institute for Health Research and Policy and the UIC Cancer Center.
The new UIC Center of Excellence in Eliminating Health Disparities will involve faculty from all six of UIC's health sciences colleges, the UIC Institute for Health Research and Policy, the UIC Center for Clinical Translational Science, and the UIC Cancer Center to develop a comprehensive strategy to incorporate research, education, policy changes and community partnerships to reduce health disparities in Chicago and beyond.
An extended interview as MP3 audio file is available at https://blackboard.uic.edu/bbcswebdav/institution/web/news/podcasts/PdCst65-Aug4%2709-Calhoun.mp3
Photographs of Elizabeth Calhoun are available
http://newsphoto.lib.uic.edu/main.php/calhoun/
UIC ranks among the nation's top 50 universities in federal research funding and is Chicago's largest university with 25,000 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state's major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.
For more information about UIC, visit www.uic.edu
Tags: Funding UniversityofILinoisAtChicago Eliminate Irradicate Health Disparitie
Release Date: August 18, 2009 Media Contact: Sam Hostettler, (312) 355-2522, samhos@uic.edu
$4.8M Grant to Develop New Treatments for Depression
The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a five-year, $4.8 million federal grant to develop new therapeutics to treat depression.
Depression, a serious medical illness involving the brain, affects more than 20 million people in the United States, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Symptoms can include sadness, loss of interest in activities that were once enjoyed, weight change, difficulty in sleeping (or oversleeping), loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness and thoughts of death or suicide.
The illness can run in families, and it occurs more often in women than men. The most common treatment option is the combination of antidepressant medication and psychotherapy. Other treatments include lifestyle, behavioral and thought modifications, and alternative and complimentary medicines.
What's needed are antidepressants that work faster, have fewer side effects and that act pharmacologically in new ways, says Alan Kozikowski, UIC professor of medicinal chemistry and pharmacogonosy and the grant's principal investigator.
Kozikowski and his research team had been designing and synthesizing novel nicotine-like compounds that target certain receptors in the brain, in hopes that they would improve cognition in Alzheimer's disease. Studies in animal models revealed that some of these compounds had antidepressant activity.
"We thus chose to focus our program on depression, as this offered
a very different target that might lead to something better, with a faster onset of action," Kozikowski said.
While the main focus of the research now is to develop medications for depression, Kozikowski said it's likely some candidate compounds may have other clinical applications, including the treatment of schizophrenia, pain and nicotine dependence.
In fact, the UIC drug discovery group -- which also includes investigators from the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix and from PsychoGenics Inc. in Tarrytown, N.Y. -- has already found that some of these novel agents do work for pain in animal models.
Prior research has also shown that many smokers smoke to improve their mood, supporting the notion that nicotine itself has antidepressant properties. This would explain, Kozikowski said, why cigarette smoking is much more common among depressed individuals. A recent study found that smokers are 41 percent more likely than nonsmokers to suffer from depression.
Such studies suggest that nicotinic compounds that have been modified to reduce their addictive potential while retaining the ability to balance mood could provide a new family of antidepressant drugs, he said.
This new drug class could have greater efficacy and fewer side effects than antidepressant medications currently on the market that work by inhibiting monoamine reuptake, Kozikowski said. Side effects of current antidepressants include headache, nausea, insomnia, dry mouth, constipation and agitation.
In spite of the intensive efforts that have gone into the design and study of nicotinic drugs, very few of the compounds have reached clinical trials, Kozikowski said.
The new grant is part of the National Cooperative for Drug Discovery and Development Groups and is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, one of the National Institutes of Health.
Kozikowski's coworkers include Rong He, research assistant professor at UIC; Andrew Mesecar, professor in the UIC Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology; Jianhua Liu, postdoctoral research associate at UIC; Ron Lukas, of the Barrow Neurological Institute; and Barbara Caldarone of PsychoGenics Inc.
For more information about UIC, visit www.uic.edu
--------------------
Tags: Grants New-treatments Depression University-of-illinois-at-chicago Activism
--OR--
--OR-- People always blaming the person with a condition claiming they're overreacting or being psychotic (often misusing the term, actually)...
--OR-- How about this: My own brother said to me: "I'm not going to resond to you because your brain does not work right."
Please note I also posted this on the NKM2 website on facebook. I would very much just like your feedback and experiences about if something similar has happened and how we are to reach an understanding with people who are not conditioned to understand.
On f.book I also said the following: I have a lot say about this topic and got the stamp of approval from Joey, himself, to get the discussion going...
What do you think? We all know it's difficult, but let's get personal.
It's the only way to get universal understanding...I'll update with my stories later, but I would very much like to hear what all of you, comrades, have to say about your experiences with this, no matter which side of the line you are on.
anybody? And a fellow supporter,
Tags: Solutions Understanding Misunderstanding
|
|
|
