Health
A survey of voters in rural California counties, including Mendocino, found broad agreement that obesity is a major problem and strong support for community action to prevent obesity and related chronic diseases.
The survey found that 85 percent of Mendocino voters describe obesity as a “serious problem,” and 85 percent agree that the neighborhoods where people live affect their risk for obesity.
“Local data collected from recent health information surveys show that 56 percent of Mendocino adults and 43 percent of its children and teens are either obese or overweight, so it’s not surprising that community concern about obesity is so high,” said Colleen Schenck, program administrator with Mendocino County Public Health Services.
The 12 rural California counties included in the survey are part of the CA4Health Community Transformation Grant initiative funded by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention and the Public Health Institute.
Mendocino County was awarded $1.2 million over five years under CA4Health to implement proven strategies aimed at improving the health and well being of those living and working in the county.
Other participating counties include Calaveras, Humboldt, Imperial, Madera, Merced, Monterey, Shasta, Siskiyou, Solano, Tulare and Tuolumne.
The survey found that Mendocino County residents strongly support a community-wide approach to preventing obesity, seeing roles for health care providers (92 percent), community and civic organizations (78 percent), local schools (95 percent), food retailers (82 percent), restaurants (76 percent), churches and other faith-based organizations (70 percent), employers (71 percent) and local government (79 percent).
The poll also highlighted strong support for community actions intended to reduce consumption of soda and other sugary drinks, such as strengthening school nutrition standards to limit the sale of unhealthy foods and drinks (74 percent) and improving access to fresh drinking water in parks, schools, and public buildings (89 percent).
According to the survey, an overwhelming majority of Mendocino County residents recognize that the added sugar in sugary beverages increases a person’s chances of becoming overweight and obese (92 percent), developing Type 2 diabetes (88 percent), high blood pressure (79 percent), and heart disease (78 percent).
“These poll results show that we are on the right path with the local efforts already underway with the support of our Community Transformation Grant funding,” said Schenck.
“Residents are seeing the value of different sectors working together to create a healthier community,” she said. “That’s why we’re working closely with schools, community organizations, businesses and other leaders to achieve goals like making it easier and safer for our kids to walk or bike to school and encouraging them to choose water instead of soda and other sugar-filled beverages. When healthier options are readily available, people can make healthier choices for themselves and their families.”
The Mendocino County poll also found strong local support for the roles that Community Health Workers can play to help people manage chronic diseases and their risk factors, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
Community Health Workers are individuals specially trained to provide the information and skills people need to better manage their own health.
According to the survey, 96 percent of Mendocino County residents believe community health workers would be valuable in teaching people how to manage and monitor their medical conditions, be physically active and eat healthier, take their medication properly, and improve communications with doctors and other health care providers.
According to the poll, Mendocino County residents strongly support covering the services provided by Community Health Workers through private health plans (94 percent), Medicare (99 percent) and Medi-Cal (96 percent).
The 12-county sample size was 1,810, approximately 150 interviews per county. Surveys were conducted via telephone (both landline and cellular phones), among representative samples of registered voters. Surveys were completed between Aug. 3 and Aug. 19, 2012.
- Details
- Written by: Editor
Maternal inflammation during early pregnancy may be related to an increased risk of autism in children, according to new findings supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers found this in children of mothers with elevated C-reactive protein (CRP), a well-established marker of systemic inflammation.
The risk of autism among children in the study was increased by 43 percent among mothers with CRP levels in the top 20th percentile, and by 80 percent for maternal CRP in the top 10th percentile.
The findings appear in the journal Molecular Psychiatry and add to mounting evidence that an overactive immune response can alter the development of the central nervous system in the fetus.
“Elevated CRP is a signal that the body is undergoing a response to inflammation from, for example, a viral or bacterial infection,” said lead scientist on the study, Alan Brown, M.D., professor of clinical psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Mailman School of Public Health. “The higher the level of CRP in the mother, the greater the risk of autism in the child.”
Brown cautioned that the results should be viewed in perspective since the prevalence of inflammation during pregnancy is substantially higher than the prevalence of autism.
“The vast majority of mothers with increased CRP levels will not give birth to children with autism,” Brown said. “We don’t know enough yet to suggest routine testing of pregnant mothers for CRP for this reason alone; however, exercising precautionary measures to prevent infections during pregnancy may be of considerable value.”
“The brain develops rapidly throughout pregnancy,” said Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., director of NIEHS, which funds a broad portfolio of autism and neurodevelopmental-related research. “This has important implications for understanding how the environment and our genes interact to cause autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.”
The study capitalized on a unique national birth cohort known as the Finnish Maternity Cohort (FMC), which contains an archive of samples collected from pregnant women in Finland, where a component of whole blood, referred to as serum, is systematically collected during the early part of pregnancy.
The FMC consists of 1.6 million specimens from about 810,000 women, archived in a single, centralized biorepository. Finland also maintains diagnoses of virtually all childhood autism cases from national registries of both hospital admissions and outpatient treatment.
From this large national sample, the researchers analyzed CRP in archived maternal serum corresponding to 677 childhood autism cases and an equal number of matched controls.
The findings were not explained by maternal age, paternal age, gender, previous births, socioeconomic status, preterm birth, or birth weight.
The work was conducted in collaboration with investigators in Finland, including the University of Turku and the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Oulu and Helsinki.
“Studying autism can be challenging, because symptoms may not be apparent in children until certain brain functions, such as language, come on line,” said Cindy Lawler, Ph.D., head of the NIEHS Cellular, Organ, and Systems Pathobiology Branch and program lead for the Institute’s extramural portfolio of autism research. “This study is remarkable, because it uses biomarker data to give us a glimpse back to a critical time in early pregnancy.”
This work is expected to stimulate further research on autism, which is complex and challenging to identify causes.
Future studies may help define how infections, other inflammatory insults, and the body’s immune response interact with genes to elevate the risk for autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
Preventative approaches addressing environmental causes of autism may also benefit from additional research.
The study was funded primarily by an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant from NIEHS, with additional support from the National Institute of Mental Health.
- Details
- Written by: Editor
How to resolve AdBlock issue?