Foundation Names UIC Educator As Nurse Faculty Scholar

Main Category: Nursing / Midwifery
Article Date: 01 Sep 2010 - 5:00 PST


Shannon Zenk, assistant professor of health systems science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was one of 12 nurse educators nationwide selected as a Nurse Faculty Scholar by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The three-year, $350,000 grant is presented to junior faculty members who show outstanding promise as future leaders in academic nursing, according to the foundation.

Zenk will study how social factors influence rates of obesity in African-American and Hispanic women. Participants will use handheld computers to enter personal information about diet, exercise and daily stressors over the course of a week.

Geographic mapping software will be used to record information about the participants' neighborhoods, including grocery stores, restaurants, parks and crime. Zenk will test whether unsupportive neighborhoods exacerbate effects of stress on participants' diet and exercise behaviors.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, non-Hispanic black and Hispanic women have the highest rates of obesity (41.9 percent and 30.7 percent, respectively). Obesity is defined as a body mass index of 30 or above. It is a contributing cause of many health problems, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and some types of cancer.

In a new report issued by the CDC, about 2.4 million more adults were obese in 2009 than in 2007. More than 15 percent of adults are obese in every state -- and in nine states, more than 30 percent are obese. The medical costs of obesity in the U.S. are "staggering," the report said. In 2008 dollars, these costs totaled nearly $147 billion.

"More efforts are needed, and new federal initiatives are helping to change our communities into places that strongly support healthy eating and active living," the report said.

Zenk's study is the first to examine interactions between stress and the neighborhood environment among people prone to obesity. She said she hopes the results "will inform environmental and policy changes that reduce sources of stress in the daily lives of Hispanic and African-American women and improve neighborhood environments to make healthy behaviors easier."

"My goal is to better understand how life circumstances influence diet and exercise behaviors that put Hispanic and African-American women at higher risk of obesity," she said.

Source
University of Illinois at Chicago

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