Major NIH grant to fund study of Latino health

The National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities recently awarded Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, an associate professor of nutritional sciences, and his collaborators at the Hispanic Health Council and Hartford Hospital an $8.25 million, five-year grant to establish the Connecticut Center of Excellence for Eliminating Health Disparities among Latinos.

The new center, the first of its kind in the northeastern United States, will employ a mix of research, education and training, and community outreach initiatives to address the health disparities faced by minorities. These disparities, which came to national attention in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, pose a looming problem across the country – and in Connecticut – to the growing Latino community.

Consider:

• By the year 2050, the Latino population nationwide is projected to grow to 90 million, or 25 percent of the U.S. population.
• Between 1990 and 2000, Connecticut’s Latino population grew by 50.3 percent, making Latinos the state’s largest minority population.
• Latinos are severely affected by Type 2 diabetes at a rate about twice that of Caucasians.
• Latinos experience the worst poverty rate among the six ethnic groups in Connecticut analyzed in the U.S. Census, and are substantially less likely than their Caucasian and African American peers to have health insurance.
• The ethnic group has the lowest level of education in the state.

“Latinos comprise the fastest growing minority group in the state and the country, and are severely affected by poverty and all sorts of risk factors and diseases,” says Pérez-Escamilla, who has been studying public health and nutrition issues among the Latino – mostly Puerto Rican – community in Hartford since 1994. “They face very serious issues related to lack of access to quality health care and poor nutrition, and those issues are often exacerbated by cultural, language, and educational barriers.”

The center will build upon the 10-year-old community and research-based nutrition education program Pérez-Escamilla has directed in Hartford in collaboration with the Hispanic Health Council and Hartford Hospital. The program’s established interventions include puppet shows that teach school children about proper nutrition; health and nutrition social marketing campaigns; and peer counseling programs to promote breast feeding and diabetes prevention. Pérez-Escamilla’s research group has published extensively on the impact of these interventions.

The center will have four core components: administration, research, education and training, and community outreach. The administration component will be housed on the Storrs campus, and UConn also will take the lead in research and education and training; the Hispanic Health Council will direct the community connections component, under the supervision of Pérez-Escamilla’s co-principal investigator, Grace Damio.