Community and Population Research
Community and population research examines the impact of behavior, environment, or genetics on children’s health based on information from large groups of children and their families. Community and population research within the PRI also tests the effectiveness of public health measures, preventive medicine or public policy on the health of communities and larger societies. At the WVU Pediatric Research Institute, these studies take our faculty out into the state to work with schools, community groups and government organizations to develop and test methods to improve the health of West Virginians.
Coronary Artery Risk Detection in Appalachian Communities Project (CARDIAC)
Principal Investigator: Dr. William Neal
The unacceptably high prevalence of heart disease and diabetes in West Virginia is well known. Over the past 13 years, 135,887 kindergarten, second-, fifth-, and eighth-grade students in West Virginia have been screened by WVU’s CARDIAC program. Thus, the CARDIAC Project is one of the largest children’s cardiovascular and metabolic risk screening program set within the school setting and incorporating comprehensive screening measures such as fasting lipid profiles. CARDIAC, which involves schools in all of the state's 55 counties, has four components: a school-based surveillance initiative, an intervention initiative, a transdisciplinary research approach, and educational initiatives for health science students.
Visit www.cardiacwv.org for more information about the CARDIAC Project.
Birth Score Project
Principal Investigator: Dr. Martha Mullett
The identification of infants who are at greatest risk for health and developmental problems, and ensuring that these children have access to appropriate health and special care systems, are ongoing concerns for state health officials. In this regard, the West Virginia Bureau for Public Health, Office of Maternal, Child and Family Health and the West Virginia University School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics have worked collaboratively to develop the Birth Score-Developmental Risk Screen and Newborn Hearing Screen initiatives. This partnership has not only expanded the state’s capacity to meet its federally required "child find" responsibilities, but it has also made a significant contribution to the reduction of mortality among West Virginia infants who are one month to one year of age.
On March 14, 1998, the state legislature amended chapter sixteen of the code of West Virginia by adding Articles 22A and 22B. Article 22A requires the testing of newborn infants for hearing loss and requires that physicians or midwives attending a live birth assure that a test for hearing loss is performed. Article 22B authorizes the division of health to establish and implement the birth score program and requires that hospitals, birthing facilities, attending physicians and other persons attending a birth, ensure that a birth score is determined.
Each time a baby is born in a West Virginia hospital, hospital staff members collect a set of data for WVU’s Birth Score Project within 24 hours of the delivery. Information on the mother and newborn from hospital records, along with the mother’s answers to a set of standard questions, are made part of the Birth Score database. The information is used for risk assessment and referral of high risk infants to support systems or clinics. State agencies can use aggregate data for program development and planning of services. This information is also valuable for public health research. Most recently the information has been merged with the CARDIAC data to evaluate some of the outcomes relating to birth weight and its relation to adult cardiovascular disease and childhood obesity.
Visit www.wvdhhr.org/birthscore/ for more information about the Birth Score Project.