Chronic Disease Epi

Drs. JoAnn E. Manson and Julie E. Buring, both professors in the Dept. of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Dept of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, have received NIH funding to study vitamin D and the marine omega-3 fatty acids in the primary prevention of cancer and cardiovascular disease.  The large-scale randomized trial is entitled the VITamin D and OmegA-3 TriaL (VITAL) and will include 20,000 U.S. men and women above the ages of 60 and 65 years, respectively.

Obesity

Dr. Xiaoxing He (assistant professor at Department of Health Sciences, Cleveland State University) and a team of collaborating assistant professors from Stony Brook University recently studied 6,799 U.S. adults who were enrolled in the Health and Retirement Study in 2006 to assess the mean differences between self-reported versus measured height and weight.  They found that obesity prevalence rate was under-estimated by self-reported data among all racial and ethnic groups.

The findings indicate that concordance between self-reported versus measured height and weight should be taken into consideration when interpreting overweight or obesity status and related clinical outcomes. More studies are needed to identify the appropriate correction equation for obtaining optimal concordance or accurate estimates of overweight and obesity from self-reported data. This manuscript is currently under review at American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and Xiaoxing is the corresponding author.