Minnesota Obesity Center

Advancement in Epidemiology and Intervention

The Epidemiology and Intervention Core has been very active, and much of this action is noted above in discussions of the Obesity Consortium, Obesity Prevention Center and TREC Center.

 

Newly Funded Programs:

Highlights of the work of members of this core include several large newly funded programs:

  • Drs. Mary Story, Robert Jeffery and Leslie Lytle have begun development of a National Program Office for a 5-year, $16 million initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Eating Research Initiative, focusing on policy, environment, and evidence-based research in childhood obesity prevention.
  • Dr. Mary Story has begun a new project titled “Bright Start: Obesity Prevention in Native American School Children” supported by the NHLBI, which will examine the effects of a two-year school-based physical activity environmental intervention on body weight change among kindergarten and 1st grade students in 14 schools on two American Indian reservations in South Dakota.

 

Health Care Delivery Section

The Epidemiology & Intervention Core continues to provide support for the health care delivery section at HealthPartners Research Foundation, a large managed-care organization in Minnesota. The Health Care Delivery Section is intended to stimulate research on obesity-related issues in a real world health care delivery system. The collaboration provides access to large populations and support and consultation around technical areas such as health care economics, health system database design and management, and survey implementation. Work with HealthPartners has resulted in 8 new research grant applications in the past year. Notable among these has been the recent NIH/HealthPartners Prime support for Nancy Sherwood’s project called “NOVEL Approaches to Weight Loss Maintenance”. This research will evaluate the efficacy of an innovative approach to promoting weight maintenance among recent weight losers.