$6.6M Grant to Fund U. Oklahoma Diabetes Center

Oct 03, 05:03 AM

Current Headlines: By Kristin Hale

By Kristin Hale
Oklahoma Daily ( U. Oklahoma )

(U-WIRE) NORMAN, Okla. -- New funding at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center will allow for the creation of the Oklahoma Center for American Indian Diabetes Health Disparities. The National Institutes of Health awarded J. Neil Henderson, a medical anthropologist at the OU College of Public Health, $6.6 million to research diabetes in American Indians. Henderson said his research will focus primarily on how diabetes affects maternal health, infant mortality and obesity in American Indians. American Indians are two to three times more likely than other Americans to have diabetes, and Oklahoma has the highest number of citizens per capita with diabetes, according to HSC. Diabetes, a disease in which blood glucose levels are above normal, can cause heart disease, blindness, kidney failure and lower-extremity amputations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Our goal is to reduce the amount of health disparities in American Indian diabetes, which is unnecessarily high," Henderson said. Gary Anderson, history professor, said the high rate of diabetes and other diseases among American Indians can be traced to the period when Europeans first came to North America. "There are certain diseases that tend to affect American Indians more than other people," Anderson said. "American Indians were, at one time, very homogeneous physiologically, so when the Europeans came, their immune systems were not prepared." Cory Miller, architecture senior and member of OU's Retaining American Indians Now group, said he thinks the grant is well placed. "It is an excellent use of money," Miller said. "Diabetes among American Indians is a big deal because diet has shifted for them for a long time, and they just haven't adjusted." Henderson said the research should benefit people of all cultures. "We want to be able to attack diabetes in American Indians and hopefully for all people with this research," Henderson said. "It will hopefully help everyone suffering from diabetes." Research will begin as soon as possible, he said, but the new center must work with the support of American Indian tribes. "We have already gotten letters that are supportive of the project," Henderson said. "We will begin research and start-up immediately." Henderson said there is special collaboration for this project. "We have, for the first time, assembled a team of scientists in all areas of medical research to study diabetes in American Indians," he said. "It is something that, to my knowledge, has not been done before, [waging] a widely multi-disciplinary attack on this problem." The attack can take place because of the nature of the disease itself. "Diabetes is complex enough in its start-up and how it operates in the body that it actually requires experts from all fields to get a good understanding of it so we can fight it," Henderson said.

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