UF College of Journalism and Communications

Potent Partnership

Health researchers team up with the College

By Lindsey Karlin

Advertising Associate Prof. Marilyn Roberts’ mother and grandmother died from diabetes-related complications. It’s the reason her two sons never knew their grandmother, and her brother measures his blood-sugar levels every day.

It’s also what sparked a conversation between Roberts and Dr. Richard Johnson, chief of nephrology at the UF College of Medicine, after she heard him discuss diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease at a Provost dinner last year.

“My ears perked up,” Roberts said, “because, not only does this issue strike a personal chord, it’s also a serious epidemic in our country.” 

At the same time, Roberts caught Johnson’s attention during the Provost dinner when she discussed her research on mass media agenda setting and its influence on public opinion and behavior.

“I was very, very lucky to have met Marilyn Roberts,” Johnson noted. “[She] said, ‘You know, it’s possible that we might be able to help you in terms of developing a schema for taking your information to the public.’”

Such connections have been driving a major emphasis in the College: health communication research. During the past two years, faculty members and graduate students have become increasingly involved in several health-related projects – from oral cancer awareness to cancer clinical trial participation to an STD (sexually transmitted disease) epidemic among seniors – with some of UF’s top medical researchers.

Researchers from Shands Hospital and the UF Health Science Center, in particular, have called upon the College to help communicate their findings and promote healthier behavior.

“We can build the best invention known to man, but if we don’t know how to communicate it to the world, then not many people will know about it,” said Dr. John Wingard, deputy director of the Shands Cancer Center.

The growing public and government interest in health, along with scientists’ need for communication expertise, have built a foundation for this new field in the College.

“The NIH [National Institutes of Health], just probably five to eight years ago, discovered that there are people out there who do communication scholarship,” journalism Prof. Kim Walsh-Childers said. “Some of them actually know something about health issues, as well.”

In recent years, more professors with research interests in health and science communication have joined the College faculty. They’ve had good timing. Faculty members are often expected to bring in external funding, and health care offers many funding opportunities, Walsh-Childers noted.

“This research is going to raise the profile of our College,” said Debbie Treise, associate dean of Graduate Studies and an advertising professor. “It’s going to raise the profile of our researchers to where we should be – to be thought of as really a player in these grants.”

Collaborative inclination

When it comes to health communication research, the College can join forces with numerous partners on campus, noted Sylvia Chan-Olmsted, associate dean for research and a telecommunication professor.

One example of the College’s collaborative efforts is the proposal for a $2.8 million Congressional Appropriations Request to establish Florida’s first obesity treatment and prevention center.

The Integrated Center for Obesity Treatment and Prevention will bring together clinicians and researchers from six UF colleges, including the College of Medicine, the College of Public Health and Health Professions and the College of Health and Human Performance. The center will study the causes and treatment of metabolic disorders in people who suffer from obesity, ensuring quality service and care. In turn, the researchers will have access to a database, according to the Congressional Appropriations Request Form.

After Roberts and Johnson began brainstorming the idea at the Provost dinner, Chan-Olmsted organized the research proposal and showed it to Steve Dorman, dean of the College of Health and Human Performance, who decided to join the project.

In March 2007, Johnson spoke at the College about his research findings.

“I told them about my dream of having an obesity center, and everyone thought it was a great idea,” Johnson said. “We started exchanging research ideas, and before I knew it, there were all these people from different colleges expressing interest.”

If Congress awards the grant, the College will receive about $200,000 to research groups with higher incidences of obesity, including African-Americans, Hispanic Americans and children and adolescents in rural areas, according to the Appropriations Request.

The College will play an integral role on multiple levels, including educating the community about the Obesity Center and developing ways to recruit people for treatment, Johnson said.

“Another level will be to alert national news groups to educate the nation about the work coming from the university,” Johnson said. “They will also help in getting this information to the government to change public awareness and policies for labeling foods and restricting certain foods in schools.”

Helping children live

Millions of children around the world require daily insulin injections to stay alive, but only a fraction receives them.

“Countless preventable deaths, as well as widespread amputations, are occurring in Asia, Mexico and sub-Saharan Africa due to a lack of insulin supply, which for the most part is unknown [to people] beyond those in the diabetes field,” said photojournalism Prof. John Kaplan, co-founder of CureNet: A Communications Strategy in the Quest to Identify a Cure for Diabetes.

Kaplan has partnered with one of the world’s leading Type 1 diabetes researchers, Mark Atkinson, who co-directs UF’s Diabetes Center of Excellence. They plan to inform the medical community about new diabetes research initiatives, recruit potential pancreas organ donors and raise awareness about the global insulin shortage crisis.

CureNet aims to highlight the need for research, the immediate need for insulin in certain parts of the world and the accelerated training of medical professionals in the Third World, Kaplan said.

Kaplan, in collaboration with students and alumni, has received $25,000 in seed funding from Shands at UF to produce a series of multimedia essays profiling long-term survivors of Type 1 diabetes. It will be exhibited at the 2009 American Diabetes Association International Convention.

Another important component of CureNet will be the development of the first direct communication network, or intranet, for leading pathologists to share ideas with other researchers around the world.

“Right now, these pathologists have no effective way to communicate together in real time,” Kaplan said. “They can call up a basic Web site to look at some of these [pancreas] tissue samples, but really some of the best scientific breakthroughs are through serendipitous collaboration, so that’s what we’re trying to do.”

The VA ventures out

Treise and four communications graduate students received a $75,000 grant in 2007 to work with the Malcom Randall Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Gainesville.

They obtained the grant to research communication tactics, develop a script and produce a video for veterans who suffer from atrial fibrillation (a-fib), which causes the upper chambers of the heart to beat more rapidly and potentially trigger blood clots.

A doctor and a nurse from the VA’s stroke and heart attack department, Ron Shorr and Connie Uphold, initiated the yearlong grant, funded by U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Health Services Research and Development.

“The VA people got us involved not only on the script writing and the production, but also in the research,” Treise said. “They really appreciate and understand the value of communication.”

Treise teamed up with three doctoral students, Paula Rausch, MAMC 2006, Heather Edwards and Mic Brookshire, and science-and-health communications master’s student Ilana Echevarria to develop a program that will educate veterans diagnosed with a-fib about the condition. The video they’ll produce will also inform them about blood thinners such as aspirin and other prescription drugs that help prevent heart attacks and strokes.

The research included about 20 in-depth interviews and focus groups, designed to find the best way to communicate with veterans and the specific information they need to know about the condition.

“Many units on campus will put together a grant, and then they’ll go, ‘Oh, we probably should have a communication component to this; maybe we should talk to the people in Journalism and Communications,’ ” Treise said. “Whereas the VA people came to us first.”

Hungry for health knowledge

The public’s booming interest and access to health-care information has raised the demand for communication, said Treise, who, with Rausch, published research on nurse practitioners’ perceptions of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) for prescription drugs in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Marketing & Management in 2007.

“Culturally, there is a huge shift from people just being receivers of health-care information,” Treise said. “Now, they are more consumers, they’re more involved, and it’s more of a participatory health that people have.”

DTCA is a relatively new way for pharmaceutical companies to advertise and inform consumers about prescription drugs, without having to go through doctors, nurses or pharmacists.

“I learned from the direct-to-consumer advertising research that people are ripping these ads out and taking them to their doctors and saying, ‘I want this drug,’ ” Treise said. “We learned that because of the emergence of DTCA and the abundance of information available on the Web, consumers know enough to now question what their doctor prescribes.”

Treise is working on five different research projects with physicians at Shands and at the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center.

“The NPs [nurse practitioners] I worked with [on the DTCA project] were so excited about the study and … about what we did that they gave my name to a doctor at the VA, who is one of the most renowned cardiologists in the country,” Treise said. “We got a grant, and we’re looking at heart disease, figuring out what people know, and then we’re going to make a video to train people about taking care of themselves and their heart.”

Dr. Peter Stacpoole, director of the UF General Clinical Research Center, heard about Treise’s work and asked her to join in on an NIH grant, “Clinical and Translational Science,” to study how to convey clinical research to the public. When she showed him a list of the College’s faculty who conduct health communication research, he was amazed, she said.

For instance, Walsh-Childers completed a $144,000 study funded by the National Cancer Institute on the accuracy of breast-cancer information online, and recently teamed up with Ellen Lopez,
assistant professor in the College of Public Health and Health Professions, to submit an NIH grant proposal for $355,000.

The original study, which Walsh-Childers recently presented to the American Public Health Association, found that breast-cancer information was mostly accurate but incomplete.

“Most Web pages cover very little about the 33 key facts that women should know about breast cancer,” she said, “so they have to dig around to find the things they need to know about.”

‘Leverage to that next step’

Wingard called on Treise and advertising Prof. Michael Weigold to research the reasons for low African-American participation in cancer clinical trials.

“There are a number of important findings that they [Weigold and Treise] have made that we can leverage to that next step,” Wingard said.

Understanding the barriers for participation in cancer clinical trials is the first crucial step in increasing minorities’ treatment outcomes, he said.

“We in the health profession struggle in effectively communicating messages to the public and engaging the public in health promotion to prevent cancer, obesity, tobacco use, and in encouraging the utilization of health-screening tests,” Wingard said. “Journalism can play an enormously big role in that. By partnering, we can enhance public health by drawing on each others’ skill sets.”

Even research that was not intended to have health applications is being utilized by the medical community. Advertising Prof. Jon Morris is receiving attention from the psychiatry field for his research on emotional responses in the brain, which he conducted with the UF Brain Institute and published in the Human Brain Mapping journal in February 2007.

The study identified two specific locations in the brain that measure emotional response to stimuli such as advertising. These findings are useful in the mental health field, Morris said, because practitioners can observe and measure emotions in the brains of those suffering from depression, anxiety or other mental disorders.

“We’re the first ones to make this real link to the specific operations in the brain,” Morris said.

For the past two years, Morris has placed people in an fMRI machine and asked them to watch commercials. Meanwhile, researchers tracked their brain activity and compared it to the subjects’ reported responses on Morris’ Advertising Self Assessment Manikin (AdSAM) system.

Morris is proposing another grant for about $250,000 to reaffirm his initial findings and calibrate the areas of the brain shown to elicit emotional responses.

“We know there is activity going on in these parts of the brain,” he said, “but now we’d like to say what’s high, what’s low, where the average is and how you measure that.”

The College has only just begun to explore the possibilities for health communication research and collaborations.

“There’s a lot of health research being done on this campus,” Walsh-Childers said. “So we have a lot to offer those programs because for the most part, mass communication has not been the focus of [them].”

Treise predicts the College will collaborate on many more grant proposals in coming years.

“We’re moving toward a greater recognition of the College’s expertise in communication research,” she said, “and the value of that expertise to people who are doing health-related research in other parts of the university.”

—With reporting by Rita Chernyak.