SAN ANTONIO (May 7, 2014) – A new obesity management program will use family counseling, text messages and newsletters to control weight and spark healthier eating and physical activity habits in obese/overweight Latino kids, thanks to a five-year $2.9 million federal grant awarded to researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

The study is funded by the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development.

Researchers will develop and test the six-month program among 230 child-parent pairs in three pediatric clinics of the University Health System.

Half the child-parent pairs will get in-clinic counseling on how to make healthy changes.

The other half will get the same in-clinic counseling – plus phone counseling and culturally tailored text messages and newsletters to reinforce changes suggested through counseling.

“We believe kids in the more intensive group will significantly improve their body composition, increase their physical activity levels, consume more fruits and vegetables and fewer sugary drinks, and decrease their sedentary habits, like watching TV,” said Deborah Parra-Medina, Ph.D., M.P.H., the study’s principal investigator and a professor at the Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR) at the UT Health Science Center San Antonio.

About 39 percent of Latino kids ages 2 to 19 are overweight or obese, compared to 32 percent of all U.S. youngsters.

Research indicates that Latino kids tend to have more limited access to physical activity options and healthy food, contributing to obesity and related health issues, like diabetes.

Dr. Parra-Medina’s new obesity management program will tackle many of these factors.

Counseling will focus on consuming more fruits and vegetables and less sugar-sweetened beverages, limiting screen time and being active at least one hour a day. Strategies to improve eating habits include eating breakfast daily, eating more meals at home, eating meals as a family most days, and allowing the child to self-regulate his/her meals.

Dr. Parra-Medina and her colleagues will develop content for culturally tailored newsletters and text messages to reinforce those concepts. Dr. David Akopian of The University of Texas at San Antonio will implement the text messaging system.

The team will measure the impact of the program on body composition, insulin, glucose and cholesterol levels, and health behavior changes, like fruit and vegetable consumption.

“We think this will become an effective way to reduce and prevent obesity in Hispanic families,” Dr. Parra-Medina said.

Others from IHPR faculty and staff involved in the study are Cynthia Mojica, Ph.D., assistant professor, and Laura Esparza, M.S., project coordinator. Others from the UT Health Science Center involved in the study are: Carisse Orsi, M.D., assistant professor of pediatrics, and Yuanyuan Liang, Ph.D., assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics.

Media Contacts: Will Sansom, (210) 567-2579; sansom@uthscsa.edu
Cliff Despres, (210) 562-6517, despres@uthscsa.edu

 

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, one of the country’s leading health sciences universities, ranks in the top 3 percent of all institutions worldwide receiving National Institutes of Health funding. The university’s schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, health professions and graduate biomedical sciences have produced more than 29,000 graduates. The $765 million operating budget supports eight campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. For more information on the many ways “We make lives better®,” visit www.uthscsa.edu.

The Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR) at The UT Health Science Center at San Antonio investigates the causes and solutions to the unequal impact of cancer and chronic disease among certain populations, including Latinos, in South Texas and the nation. The IHPR, founded in 2006, uses evidence-guided research, training and community outreach to improve the health of those at a disadvantage due to race/ethnicity or social determinants. Visit the IHPR online at http://ihpr.uthscsa.edu or follow its blog at http://www.saludtoday.com/blog.

SAN ANTONIO (May 1, 2014) — Obesity increases the risk of myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells that accumulate inside the bones.

And with current obesity trends in the United States and especially in South Texas, that’s ominous.

“I’m predicting an increase in multiple myeloma,” said Edward Medina, M.D., Ph.D., “and with the obesity problems we see in the Hispanic population, there could be a serious health disparity on the horizon.”

Dr. Medina, a hematopathologist and assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, is looking at exactly how obesity causes an increased risk for myeloma.

What he and his colleagues have discovered is a potential way to not only boost the effectiveness of current chemotherapy treatments for myeloma, but at the same time a way to help the body help itself.

In a paper published this week in the journal Leukemia, Dr. Medina and his team look at an important little protein called adiponectin.

Myeloma is often called multiple myeloma because it occurs at many sites within the bone marrow. Healthy plasma cells produce antibodies that fight infection in the body, but myeloma cells produce high levels of abnormal antibodies that, when the cancer cells accumulate, they crowd out production of other important blood cells, both red and white.

“They basically overtake the bone marrow,” Dr. Medina said.

The disease can lead to bone pain and fragility, confusion, excessive thirst and kidney failure. While survival rates for patients with myeloma have increased in recent years, many people do not live more than five years beyond diagnosis.

Adiponectin is a protective protein that plays several roles in keeping the body healthy, including killing cancer cells. While adiponectin is produced by fat cells, Medina said, obese people have less of it. The reason for this paradox is that in cases of obesity, fat cells function abnormally, including producing less adiponectin. What they produce more of, however, are fatty acids, and it is likely that myeloma cells can feed on these fatty acids.

“Synthesizing fatty acids is important for myeloma cells to build vital structures, including cell membranes, that enable them to keep on growing,” Medina said.

Focusing on adiponectin led Dr. Medina’s lab to protein kinase A or “PKA” — a protein that, when activated by adiponectin, suppresses the fatty acids that myeloma cells need, leading to their demise.

The idea is to use the understanding of the pathways that adiponectin uses to kill myeloma cells to create a drug that would do the same thing.

“If we could pharmacologically suppress these fatty acid levels in obese myeloma patients, we could boost the effects of the chemotherapy that targets PKA or fatty acid synthesis, and potentially decrease the chemotherapeutic dose,” Medina said. “Also, it would give your own body’s protective measures more of a chance to work against the cancer.”

Dr. Medina’s research was funded by the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation and a KL2 award from the Health Science Center’s IIMS-Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Key contributors to this work include Kelli Oberheu, Srikanth Polusani, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biochemistry and Babatunde Oyajobi, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of cellular and structural biology.