The University of the Virgin Islands, University of Puerto Rico and University of the West Indies are participating in a study to examine the risk factors and prevalence of heart disease, cancer and diabetes in the eastern Caribbean. The study is made possible by a five-year, $5 million federal grant awarded to Yale School of Medicine Professor Marcella Nunez-Smith, a St. Thomas native.
Nunez-Smith, an assistant professor of general internal medicine and assistant director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, will lead the study.
The $5 million grant from the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities (part of the National Institutes of Health) establishes the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network (ECHORN), with its coordinating center based at Yale.
The ECHORN project aims to form a research collaborative across the eastern Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago. Nunez-Smith’s goal is to help improve health outcomes across the region by establishing a cross-island surveillance partnership.
ECHORN will also work to increase research capacity and infrastructure within the region. Data collection should begin by the summer of 2012.
“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,” Nunez-Smith said in a statement. “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.”
Nunez-Smith is also a researcher at Yale’s Global Health Leadership Institute. She says the research findings will have direct implications for health policy in the region and for health inequities research and policy in the mainland United States.
Nunez-Smith’s mother, UVI nursing professor Maxine Nunez, is the university’s site principal investigator for the study.
Nunez-Smith is a graduate of the All Saints Cathedral School on St. Thomas and Swarthmore College. She earned her medical degree at Jefferson Medical College and did her residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She completed a fellowship in academic medicine at Yale University.
This is not Nunez-Smith’s first study of medical issues affecting the territory. Last year, Nunez-Smith was principal author of a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine that found the mortality rate for pneumonia, heart attack and heart failure are all substantially higher in the U.S. territories than stateside. (See related links below.)
