6 minute read
Research Round-Up
COVID from all angles
Phoenix Matthews, PhD, professor and associate dean for equity and inclusion, is involved in three critical areas of COVID-19 research: vetting the vaccine’s approval process, helping communities disproportionately affected by the virus, and outlining ways to conduct ethical research.
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Vaccine confidence: Matthews was among three UIC faculty involved in the Chicago Scientific COVID-19 Vaccine Working Group. The group, convened by the Chicago Department of Public Health, was tasked with independently evaluating whether the proper scientific and regulatory review has taken place for authorizing emergency use for COVID-19 vaccines.
“Providing reassurances to community members about safety is critically important to the success of widespread vaccination programs,” Matthews said.
Community outreach: Matthews joined the Chicagoland COVID Collaborative, a multi-center group that is bolstering research and outreach to help communities disproportionately affected by COVID-19. The UIC-led collaborative, supported by a $1.3 million NIH grant, will focus on strengthening COVID-19 vaccine confi dence and access in Chicago-area Black and Latino communities, as well as improving access to testing, treatment and opportunities for clinical trial participation.
Ethical research: Matthews joined assistant professor Natasha Crooks, PhD, RN, in authoring a paper on how to ethically conduct research with Black populations in the context of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement. It was published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics. “Our recommendations include understanding the impact of ongoing trauma, acknowledging historical context, ensuring diverse research teams and engaging in open and honest conversations with Black populations to better address their needs,” the authors wrote.
HIV rates among Black women
Assistant professor Natasha Crooks, PhD, RN, explored sociocultural conditions that are contributing factors in higher rates of HIV and STIs among Black women as lead author in a paper published in the journal Social Science & Medicine.
These conditions include: being silenced about their sexuality; protecting Black men who may be transmitting infections; and cultural norms, stereotypes and messaging about sexuality.
“Our findings demonstrate the need for STI/HIV prevention programs to address these sociocultural conditions to improve Black female sexual health,” Crooks and her co-authors wrote in the paper.
Despite the fact that Black women have fewer sex partners and are less likely to engage in unprotected sex, their chlamydia rates were fi ve times those of white women, and gonorrhea rates were 8.8 times higher, according to CDC data for 2018. Among women diagnosed with HIV in 2016, 61% were Black, compared with 19% who were white, according to the CDC.
“There was no framework or theories specifi c to Black women,” Crooks said. “That’s huge: You can’t work to reduce STIs and HIV in this population if you don’t understand their experiences.”
Managing suicide risk
What should researchers do if a study participant reports suicidal thoughts?
Susan Dunn, PhD, RN, FAHA, FAAN, UIC Nursing associate professor, explored this question as lead author in a paper that was published in the January/February edition of Nursing Research.
Although suicide screening tools are widely available for patients in emergency, hospital and primary care settings and have been used in research, there is a “signifi cant gap” in the availability of published suicide risk management protocols for use in research studies, the authors wrote.
Because of this, Dunn, who is conducting an NIH-funded study on hopelessness in cardiac patients, says she developed a protocol “from the ground up” to identify, measure and act on suicidal ideation expressed by study participants.
“The reason I wanted to publish the protocol is so that others can use it as a model for their own research,” she says. “How many studies are assessing for suicidal ideation? I think that’s a signifi cant issue. It’s not always being assessed in high-risk patients.”
Age-adjusted suicide rates increased 30% from 2000 to 2016, according to the paper, and Dunn says they’re even higher now due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID cleaning an asthma trigger?
Those with asthma are experiencing less asthma control related to an increase in using household disinfectants — known asthma triggers — because of COVID-19, according to a survey co-conducted by University of Illinois Chicago researchers.
Results of the survey, co-led by UIC Nursing associate professor Kamal Eldeirawi, PhD, RN, FAAN, are published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.
“We became concerned with increased cleaning and disinfecting related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This, combined with spending more time indoors, may expose people with asthma to more environmental triggers for asthma symptoms,” Eldeirawi said. “This prompted our interest in studying the impact of disinfectants and asthma control among those living with asthma.”
Cleaning products are considered respiratory irritants that cause inflammation and bronchial hyperresponsiveness, Eldeirawi explained.
In the online survey, conducted between May and September 2020, adults with asthma answered questions about handwashing and hand sanitizer use, household disinfectant use and frequency. They also were asked five questions about asthma symptoms, use of rescue medications, and effect of asthma on daily functioning.
Researchers observed signifi cant associations of frequent disinfectant use since the pandemic with uncontrolled asthma. And, while the researchers did not collect data on increases in health care providers’ or ER visits for asthma, a large percentage of the respondents indicated having had an asthma attack, Eldeirawi said.
Disrupting “mother-blaming”
Poor birth outcomes in marmoset monkeys—such as stillbirth or early neonatal death—were not predictable based on adult maternal characteristics, such as age or weight gain during pregnancy, according to a study led by associate professor Julienne Rutherford, PhD.
That’s important because the fi ndings could translate to humans, where it could “disrupt mother-blaming narratives of pregnancy outcomes,” wrote Rutherford and her co-authors in a paper published in the journal PLOS One.
“So much guilt and shame around pregnancy loss is in part because of our focus on lifestyle, and the individualist emphasis on personal responsibility complicates our ability to address the problems that are deeper, structural and intergenerational,” Rutherford said.
Instead, the researchers found that a marmoset monkey’s own experiences in the womb and at birth were associated with early neonatal death for her offspring. Female marmosets who were triplet-born or born at lower birth weights had greater rates of infant loss during the fi rst week of life when they became mothers.
Generational effects of Rwandan genocide
A study led by Glorieuse Uwizeye, PhD ’20, fi nds that Rwandans who were conceived by mothers who survived the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi have poorer adult health outcomes than those who were conceived by Rwandan mothers living outside the country at that time.
In addition, those who were conceived through genocidal rape have poorer adult health outcomes than those conceived by genocide survivors who were not raped. The fi ndings were published in Social Science and Medicine.
More than 1 million Rwandans were killed during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda from April 7 to July 4, 1994. It is estimated that 100,000 to 250,000 women were raped during the 100-day genocide, and that 10,000 children were born as a result.
Uwizeye, a Rwandan genocide survivor and now an anthropology postdoctoral fellow of the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth, conducted the research for this study as part of her dissertation while a doctoral student at the UIC College of Nursing. Her PhD advisor, associate professor Julienne Rutherford, PhD, is senior author on the paper.
