Center for Population Health and Health Disparities
Funded by NIH: Grant #P50CA105631
The Center for Population Health and Health Disparities (CPHHD) is a $9.2 million 5-year grant funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Principal Investigator is Dr. James S. Goodwin, Director of the Sealy Center on Aging. The overall goal of the CPHHD is to increase understanding about the causes and causal pathways of health disparities among populations and to use that understanding to design and conduct community-based participatory research of interventions to reverse health disparities.
Progress / Key Findings:
Research supported by the UTMB CPHHD has resulted in more than 50 publications in 2004-2007. Many have been in high impact journals, such as the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (4 publications), American Journal of Public Health (4 publications), Journal of Clinical Oncology (3 publications), Cancer (4 publications), Archives of Internal Medicine (2 publications), and New England Journal of Medicine (1 publication). The research findings of the UTMB CPHHD can be divided into three major areas:
- Population-based studies of cancer treatment and treatment outcomes, and how these are influenced by patient characteristics such as ethnicity, gender and income
- Studies on mechanisms underlying the "Hispanic Paradox" - the finding that Hispanics have lower mortality from cancer and heart disease despite being disadvantaged in income, education, and access to health care.
- Studies on factors influencing health and physical function of Mexican Americans.
