The College of Nursing and Health Innovation announced Monday that it received a $2.5 million grant for research of asthma disparities among Latino children from the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
Terry Olbrysh, the college’s director for marketing and communications, said the five-year grant will fund research to explain why varying types of asthma are present in children in different populations of the Latino community.
“There’s a huge discrepancy between Mexican-American children and Puerto Rican children,” he said.
Olbrysh said researchers believe because the parents in these cultures react so differently to Western medicine, there are differences in asthma incidences between these groups.
The two-site study involves a clinic in Phoenix and another in the Bronx, N.Y. All funds go to ASU research, Olbrysh said.
“The first thing that attracted [our] attention is that there is a big increase in asthma cases … among Latino populations,” he said.
This will be the first study that breaks down these specific populations to determine why they respond differently to asthma, he said.
According to the statement, asthma affects about 33 Puerto Rican children for every two non-Latino Caucasian children.
Lead researcher on the project Kimberly Sidora-Arcoleo has been working in asthma research for 11 years.
“I’ve been interested in it from personal experiences,” said Sidora-Arcoleo, the associate director of the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Clinical Trials. Her oldest daughter, her mother and her niece all suffered from asthma, she said.
Sidora-Arcoleo originally worked on asthma discrepancies between white and African-American populations in Rochester, N.Y. She has taken that model and is now using it to study Mexican and Puerto Rican populations in Phoenix.
Puerto Rican children tend to have more severe and prevalent cases, she said, while the Mexican children have fewer cases, which are less severe.
The team will be looking at the interaction of characteristics, culture and factors of experience, the social and environmental context the family lives in and health care availability, Sidora-Arcoleo said. She said she’s interested in the treatment decisions parents make and the difference in alternative and complimentary medicine.
“What we fail to do as health care providers is … talk to parents about options,” she said. “We miss an opportunity to work with and educate the parents while at the same time being sensitive to their ethno-medical perspective.”
It is extremely important for the United States bio-medical model to be used as a compliment to cultural beliefs about medicine that certain populations have, she said.
The research will take a sample of 300 Latino families, primarily Mexican and Puerto Rican, with asthma-affected children between the ages of 5 and 12.
The recruitment will begin in April 2010 and the study results should be reported by 2013.
Reach the reporter at ndgilber@asu.edu.
