AMDeC

New York Institutes and Hospitals Team with Schools to Reduce Childhood Obesity and Diabetes

Fitness/education intervention phase of fourth study year set to kick-off in February for AMDeC’s ROAD (Reduce Obesity and Diabetes) project involving ethnically diverse student population.

NEW YORK, Jan. 19, 2010 – AMDeC, the Academy for Medical Development and Collaboration, announced today a February kick-off for the fitness/education intervention phase of the fourth study year of the innovative ROAD (Reduce Obesity and Diabetes) project involving an ethnically diverse student population in New York.

Launched in 2006 and supported by a five-year, $5 million grant from The Starr Foundation, the project has brought together public middle schools in New York and researchers with AMDeC-member biomedical research institutes and hospitals with active research programs in pediatric endocrinology that serve distinct ethnic populations. Each participating member has forged a relationship with a school to study the pathogenesis and prevention of type 2 diabetes in children through lifestyle assessments and school-based intervention consisting of health, nutrition and exercise education.

“Until recently, school-based interventions were targeted to treat individuals who were already overweight or afflicted by co-morbidities, not to prevent disease even though this type of intervention is clearly beneficial to everyone,” said Michael Rosenbaum, M.D., professor of clinical pediatrics and clinical medicine, department of pediatrics, Columbia University Medical Center, and a co-principal investigator of ROAD. “ROAD is unique in that it provides an education and fitness intervention to all middle-school students while using data from each student to examine risk factors for the medical complications associated with being overweight and how these risk factors can be addressed by a school-based intervention.”

Steven Shelov, M.D., chair, department of pediatrics, vice president, Maimonides Infants and Children's Hospital of Brooklyn, professor of pediatrics, SUNY Downstate and a co-principal investigator of ROAD, added, “The combination of education to reduce unhealthy behavior with medical exploration to better understand the underlying problems can ultimately lead to a more efficient means of reducing the incidence of adolescent obesity and its co-morbidities, especially type 2 diabetes.”

Preliminary studies involving over 70 eighth-grade students have already shown that education and fitness interventions have direct benefits on multiple physical and biochemical indices of health in all students. These pilot studies demonstrated that everyone, regardless of whether or not they are overweight or obese, benefits in multiple ways from school-based health intervention.

“ROAD is an example of AMDeC’s success in bringing together New York biomedical researchers for team science projects that address critical healthcare needs,” said Maria Mitchell, Ph.D., president and CEO of AMDeC. “We transformed single-center pilot studies into the first-of-its-kind, multi-institutional childhood obesity and diabetes research project. With additional funding, AMDeC can build on ROAD and bring other team-oriented research projects to fruition that benefit New York’s research community and the general public.”

AMDeC’s members participating in ROAD are Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Maimonides Infants and Children's Hospital of Brooklyn, Winthrop University Hospital, Schneider Children’s Hospital of the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System and Mount Sinai School of Medicine.