Beyond the Heart

The JHS Expands Research Boundaries

It’s a massive problem, cardiovascular disease in African- Americans, one being met with a massive response: The Jackson Heart Study.

As the mammoth, nine-year-old study prepares its cast of thousands for a third round of medical examinations, its director and principal investigator, Dr. Herman Taylor, insisted its scope rockets beyond exam rooms and Excel sheets.

It’s given jobs to doctors, launched careers of researchers and improved public health. With all its offshoots, aspects and affiliations, it branches out like a blood-vessel system.

“It’s really a misnomer to call it a study,” Taylor said of the project that will approach $90 million in federal funding by its completion in 2013. “It’s a set of projects.”

Three of those projects showed up, fresh and eager, at a recent JHS event. Tamara Hughes, a Clinton native with a great smile, stood with Edjohnier Phillips, a confident and straight-backed young man from Bolivar County, and Janae Roberts, a tall, exuberant young lady from Lakeland, Fla.

All three are freshmen chemistry majors at Tougaloo College. All three are aspiring doctors. And all three are working with the JHS.

Roberts figures it’ll help her get more involved with public health and, when she’s a doctor, will keep her connected to her patients.

“I don’t want to be a doctor who sees you and then leaves,” Roberts said.

Phillips said the experience alone will be worth it, especially if it helps him later in life working with patients. And Hughes wants to dig into the heart-study research.

“Along with this work,” she said, “I will be taking classes in epidemiology and biostatistics. I hope it will help me decide on a field.”

The JHS began in 2000 with the premise of detailing and scientifically documenting symptoms and contributors to cardiovascular disease. Three institutions are at the study’s core: Jackson State University, Tougaloo College and the Medical Center.

Taylor and his colleagues examined 5,301 Jackson-area African-Americans to gather base-line data, re-examined participants three years later and are now calling people back for their third exam.

The data collected in the first two exams, and the changes in those three years, proved some commonly supposed points and turned up some surprising conclusions.

“By 2012 we’ll have data from three separate, complementing exams,” Taylor said. “It’s an incredibly powerful platform for investigation and discovery and hopefully an important element in improving lives.”

Considering the entangling web of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes and obesity, any number of studies can take flight from JHS data.

A barrage of other studies already have. Those works pulled in such names as Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Wake Forest University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Researchers in the Department of Ophthalmology along with the Broad Institute are looking for genetic risk factors associated with diabetic retinopathy in this subgroup of 2,500 diabetic JHS patients. Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in the U.S.

The University of Michigan is studying social determinates: the psychological impact of people’s environments, such as the placement of grocery stores and fast-food restaurants.

Wake Forest is working on imaging and study topics at the Medical Center, including peripheral vascular disease and hearing loss. Taylor said he wants more scientists to find ways to interact.

The JHS has provided career starts for doctors, graduate students, medical students and researchers, all the while reaching into Mississippi undergraduate programs, high schools and elementary schools to interest students in science.

More than 600 high school students and approximately 100 college students have interacted with the study. Its programs have brought educational training, summer research for medical students and residency opportunities for people from around the country.

“We have a significant group of undergrads who trained (with the JHS). And that includes two or three students who worked in it in high school, went on to medical school and are now residents (working with the study),” Taylor said.

The three Tougaloo students could follow the same path.

“There are Jackson State interns who work side-by-side with our Ph.D.s and M.D.s on ideas that may relate to the master’s of public health program at JSU, housed just down the hall from the heart study. Numerous Tougaloo undergrads are a part of the study’s internship program that offers stipends,” Taylor said.

Jackson State has created slots for four new Ph.D. statisticians thanks to the JHS, and the Medical Center has added two physicians.

Research has been an economic engine, not only in the short term, where it creates jobs, but also in the improving standards of living, Taylor said.

“Research findings lengthen lives, make people healthier and allow them to be more productive. In the last 50 years so much economic growth in the U.S. has been attributable to that,” he said.

A community-outreach portion of the study turns the findings into practical applications to promote health awareness to Mississippians, a group that contends daily with the worst health disparities in the country.

In the end, the study is a platform for discovery; discovery about our community’s health, about cooperation between multiple universities and agencies and about what students, physicians and researchers can accomplish when they work together.

-Jack Mazurak

2009-03-03 00:00:00 3515