Parents’ social isolation was linked to self-reported poorer health not only for themselves but also for their adolescent children, finds a study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.
“The purpose of this study was to investigate the interrelationship between parent and adolescent social isolation and health,” said Tess Thompson, research assistant professor.
“We hypothesized that self-reported health and social isolation measures would both be correlated between parents and their adolescent children,” she said. “We hypothesized that each person’s social isolation would be associated with their own health, and that within dyads (relationships between two people), one person’s isolation would be associated with the other person’s health.”
The study, “The Association Between Social Isolation and Health: An Analysis of Parent–Adolescent Dyads from the Family Life, Activity, Sun, Health, and Eating Study,” was published in the March issue of the Clinical Social Work Journal.
Data come from the 2014 Family Life, Activity, Sun, Health, and Eating Study, a cross-sectional study conducted by the National Cancer Institute. Parents and their children ages 12 to 17 were recruited through a consumer opinion panel to complete online surveys about demographics, physical activity and diet.
“The Family Life, Activity, Sun, Health, and Eating Study dataset was exciting to work with because it’s one of the few datasets that measures social isolation and health in both parents and their adolescent children,” Thompson said. “Having these measures for both parents and adolescents allowed us to examine how health and isolation for parents and adolescents are interconnected.”
Eradicating social isolation is one of the Social Work Grand Challenges issued by the American Academy for Social Work and Social Welfare, which concluded that social isolation is “a potent killer.”
Self-perceived social isolation has been linked to physical and mental health outcomes, including higher blood pressure, poor sleep and increased mortality risk.
The link between social relationships and health among adults has long been noted. However, very little empirical work has explicitly tested a relationship between social isolation and health within parent–adolescent dyads.
“Our findings add to the evidence that social isolation is associated with health and suggest that helping parents address their own social isolation may affect not only their own health, but also the social and physical health of others in the household,” Thompson said.
“It may be helpful to screen patients — both adults and adolescents — for social factors such as loneliness in health care settings. Other research has shown that interventions based on cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) may help adults who experience loneliness or social isolation, but we don’t know a lot about effective interventions addressing social isolation among adolescents.
“It’s possible that CBT may help them, too, or that innovations in social media and other technologies may help adolescents, adults and their extended families to build meaningful social connections,” Thompson added.
In this study, perceived isolation and health were measured at the same time. “This means we don’t know the direction of relationships, that is, whether social isolation affects health, or the reverse,” she said. “In the future, it will be important to investigate how these relationships unfold over time.”
The Washington University Center for Diabetes Translation Research (CDTR) is leading a collaborative effort to fund innovative projects to address diabetes and obesity disparities in St. Louis.
The rapid funding mechanism, co-sponsored by the Washington University Nutrition Obesity Research Center, Diabetes Research Center, Institute for Clinical and Translational Sciences, and Institute for Public Health, is designed to advance novel approaches in the prevention and treatment of diabetes and obesity.
This opportunity will support novel studies that explore the biological and environmental mechanisms through which social disadvantage increases diabetes/obesity burden, thus informing new leverage points for intervention.
A key component of this effort is the emphasis on moving research along the translational science spectrum, from the lab to the community. “We usually think of ‘transdisciplinary’ as integrating multiple fields of knowledge, but this is the first funding announcement to specifically require teams to work across multiple stages of the translational continuum,” says Debra Haire-Joshu, director of the CDTR and the Joyce Wood Professor of Public Health and Medicine. “The goal is to encourage innovative partnerships to create the best solutions for these complex issues.”
Awards will provide up to $60,000 direct costs, per year, for one or two years. Researchers interested in applying are encouraged to attend an informational session on March 23rd, 2020 (register here). Additional details on the funding announcement can be found here: https://cdtr.wustl.edu/pilot-feasibility/special-request-for-applications/
A study from the Center for Social Development’s SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK) experiment has been nominated for an award given to the best paper published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs.
“Exploring a Model for Integrating Child Development Accounts with Social Services for Vulnerable Families,” by Jin Huang, Sondra G. Beverly, Youngmi Kim, Margaret M. Clancy and Michael Sherraden, appeared in the journal’s Fall 2019 issue.
The article is one of three finalists selected by editor Ron Hill, the Journal’s associate editors and the Board of Directors of the American Council on Consumer Interests. Given annually, the Best Paper Award honors the authors of one article published in the journal during the prior year.
“We are honored to receive this nomination,” said Huang, the study’s lead author. “The journal sets the highest standards for scholarship on programs and policies affecting financial well-being. We feel privileged that our study would receive such recognition.” Huang is a research associate professor in the Brown School, associate professor at Saint Louis University, and a faculty director with the Center for Social Development.
The study, summarized here, examined the effects of SEED OK’s Child Development Account (CDA) intervention on low-income families in Head Start and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
Now in its 13th year, SEED OK is a randomized test of an automatic, universal and progressive CDA policy with a statewide sample. Through the intervention, newborns received an automatically opened CDA with $1,000, additional opportunities for incentives and information on the accounts.
Evidence from the SEED OK has shaped statewide CDA policies implemented in Pennsylvania, Nebraska and California, as well as new legislation, filed in both houses of Missouri’s General Assembly, to create an automatic, statewide CDA policy in the Show-Me State.
Huang and colleagues identified several benefits for families participating in Head Start and TANF. Findings show that the CDA intervention generated improvements in positive and punitive parenting, financial outcomes, levels of maternal depressive symptoms and the social-emotional development of children. Together, these effects point to a pattern of positive influence on child and family development, above and beyond the financial impacts of CDAs, which are also positive.
The authors also proposed a model for integrating the accounts into other social services. The model emphasizes automatic enrollment and the use of a centralized financial platform, the state 529 college savings plan.
The winner of the journal’s 2020 award will be announced in May at the annual conference of the American Council on Consumer Interests.
Racial and ethnic minority children and adolescents with cancer have a higher risk of death than non-Hispanic white children and adolescents, with evidence for larger disparities in survival for more treatable cancers, finds a new study from the Brown School.
“The results suggest that there are modifiable racial and ethnic disparities in childhood cancer survival,” said Kim Johnson, associate professor and senior author of “Associations Between Race/Ethnicity and US Childhood and Adolescent Cancer Survival by Treatment Amenability,” published Feb. 25 in JAMA Pediatrics.
“The results from our study emphasize the need for continued research to identify modifiable factors that explain the disparities so that we can design interventions to eliminate them prior to diagnosis and throughout treatment,” she said. “Although U.S. cancer survival rates have increased over time, disparities by race/ethnicity remain, including for children and adolescents.”
In the cohort study of 67,061 American children from birth to age 19 with a first primary malignant cancer between 2000 and 2016, those with racial/ethnic minority status had worse cancer survival compared with non-Hispanic white children and adolescents.
Among non-Hispanic black and Hispanic (all races) children and adolescents, the disparity was generally greater for cancer types with higher survival rates.
“Among children and adolescents, racial/ethnic disparities in cancer survival are well documented, particularly for those of African American and Hispanic descent,” Johnson said. “However, to our knowledge, no previous study has examined how these disparities compare for cancer types of varying survivability.”
Cancers that are more amenable to medical intervention may provide greater opportunities for disparities to manifest, as people with fewer resources may have greater challenges obtaining a timely diagnosis and optimal treatment course, the authors said.
Despite the availability of state-of-the-art therapy and clinical trials to most children and adolescents with cancer in the United States, as well as the fact that there are more policies that lead to better health care access for children than adults, racial/ethnic survival disparities remain for young cancer patients, the authors wrote.
These disparities likely result from several factors, they say, including differences in clinical trial enrollment, later diagnosis, adherence to therapy and disease biological characteristics.
Beyond these factors, there is strong evidence that factors related to socioeconomic status may mediate some of the association between race/ethnicity and childhood and adolescent cancer survival.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $838,500 to Washington University in St. Louis to train researchers to find ways improve the adoption of evidence-based practices to reduce chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease.
The annual, five-day training and ongoing mentoring for post-doctoral researchers aims to shorten the gap between research results and their use in community and clinical settings. The training will be delivered by the Institute for Scholars in Implementation Science (IS-2), a new program based at the Brown School and led by Debra Haire-Joshu, Joyce Wood Professor; and Ross Brownson, Lipstein Distinguished Professor and Director of the Prevention Research Center. The training involves nine Washington University faculty from the Brown School, the School of Medicine and the Olin Business School.
“Research discoveries often take 15-20 years before being incorporated into practice,” Haire-Joshu said. “This training of the next generation of dissemination and implementation researchers will improve the adoption of behavioral and social science interventions that may eliminate chronic disease disparities.” Chronic diseases are the leading causes of death and disability in the United States, and the primary drivers of the nation’s $3.3 trillion in annual health care costs. The burden of chronic disease falls disproportionately on minorities and low-income individuals.
“Research targeting modifiable risk factors can successfully reduce chronic disease and its deadly effects, but more study is needed to take into account the effects of poverty and other social determinants of health,” Brownson said. “Our innovative program will promote the use of evidence-based interventions in real-world settings where a large reduction in chronic disease is feasible.”
The center’s activities will include:
- Training faculty mentors to conduct a summer course for a diverse pool of high-quality Fellows.
- Evaluating the Fellows’ career development and research.
- Disseminating training materials and building the capacity of the Fellows’ institutions and community partners to put research into practice.
Debra Haire-Joshu is an internationally renowned scholar of health behavior who develops population-wide interventions to reduce obesity and prevent diabetes among underserved women and children. She holds a joint appointment in the Washington University School of Medicine, and directs the Center for Obesity Prevention and Policy Research and the Washington University Center for Diabetes Translation Research.
Ross C. Brownson is a leading expert in chronic disease prevention and applied epidemiology. He is regarded as one of the leading intellectual, educational and practice leaders in the field of evidence-based public health. The founding director of the Prevention Research Center, he has a joint appointment with the university’s School of Medicine in the Department of Surgery and the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center. He is also the co-director (with Graham Colditz) of the Washington University Implementation Science Center for Cancer Control.
Brown School Associate Professor Jason Purnell has recently joined the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Population Health Improvement.
Established in 2013, the Roundtable is comprised of science-informed leaders working to catalyze action to improve health outcomes for the entire U.S. population, addressing multiple determinants of health. Those can include access to medical care, financial status, genetics, behaviors, social or environmental factors.
Purnell’s work as director of Health Equity Works (HEW) dovetails with the work of the national group. Since its inception, HEW has been dedicated to using accessible research on health disparities in St. Louis communities to accelerate action and systems change. The organization has developed local and national partnerships to work on issues like quality housing, school health, and child development accounts (CDAs) for all children born in Missouri.
Those actions have born tangible results. One is the Healthy Schools Toolkit, a free evidence-based tool designed to help educators build healthy school communities. Another is the recently released report titled Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide. Written in partnership with well-respected St. Louis partner organizations, the report presents 11 concrete policy recommendations to support fair, affordable and inclusive housing in St. Louis.
In his role as faculty director at the Center for Social Development at the Brown School, he has worked with the Missouri Child Development Account Coalition to encourage legislation that could establish CDAs in the state.
For Purnell, it’s about using data to accelerate action and positive change. “Health and well-being are rooted in equity and opportunity. It benefits entire communities by giving everyone the opportunity to thrive and flourish,” he said. “I’m excited to learn more about national efforts in this area.”