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Name of Submitter:
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J. David Creswell
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Title of proposed idea:
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Understanding and treating established social risk factors
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What is the major obstacle/challenge in the biomedical research field? What is needed to overcome this obstacle/challenge?
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There's an impressive amount of work showing that social factors can impact health outcomes. For example, loneliness and social status are well-documented risk factors for increasing negative mental and physical health outcomes (e.g., depression, heart disease). In fact, epidemiological research indicates that these social risk factors carry a relative risk comparable to more well-publicized risk factors (e.g., smoking, self-rated health).
There are two major challenges in this understudied area of social factors and health: (1) models of how these social risk factors impact health are poorly specified. What is needed is work that aims to develop biologically plausible models linking social factors (e.g., loneliness) with intermediate behavioral and biological processes (e.g., stress and inflammation) for explaining health and disease risks. (2) The second major challenge is to develop and evaluate behavioral, pharmacological, and community-based interventions which target the social, behavioral and biological markers that drive disease-risk. |
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What emerging scientific opportunity is ripe for investment by the Common Fund?
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We are at an important point where epidemiologists and behavioral scientists indicate a prominent role for social factors in health outcomes, and new methods for measuring intermediate behavioral measures (e.g., social interaction quality and quantity as measured by ambulatory experience sampling techniques) and biological markers (e.g., circulating and stimulated pro-inflammatory cytokines, microarray analysis of gene expression) are available for developing these models. |
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What are the potential Common Fund investments that could accelerate scientific progress in this field?
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Two calls for proposals: (1) Developing biobehavioral models of how social factors influence mental and physical health. (2) Interventions for modifying how social factors impact health.
An NIH conference after 3 years to evaluate progress and the identification of biobehavioral models linking social risk factors with health outcomes. |
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If a Common Fund program on this topic achieved its objectives, what would be the impact?
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This work has the opportunity to make a broad impact on the health of our nation. Work over the last several decades has shown that broad-ranging efforts to modify other health risk factors (e.g., smoking, car accident fatalities) can be achieved via research on the biobehavioral mechanisms implicated in these risk factors (e.g., nicotinic receptors, seat belt use). Given that social risk factors carry a comparable risk, the next decade of research has the opportunity to similarly impact our understanding and treatment of social risk factors. |
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