COPTR studies will be conducted at: Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville (Principal Investigator: Shari L. Barkin, M.D., MSHS)
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland (Principal Investigator: Leona Cuttler, M.D.)
Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif. (Principal Investigator: Thomas N. Robinson, M.D., M.P.H.)
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (Principal Investigator: Simone French, Ph.D.)
The coordinating center for the program is University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Principal Investigator: June Stevens, Ph.D.)
Another large research study will evaluate existing community efforts to reduce local childhood obesity rates. The NIH has awarded a five-year, $23 million contract to Battelle Memorial Institute (Principal Investigator: Howard Fishbein, MPH., Ph.D.) in Columbus, Ohio, to examine community programs and policies in 300 demographically diverse communities across the nation. The community efforts to be evaluated are those designed to decrease local childhood obesity rates in areas where childhood obesity rates are highest. Investigators will examine how effective such efforts are in changing behaviors and reducing body weight.
"Over the past several years, communities across the United States have been implementing programs and policies to encourage healthier eating, increase opportunities for physical activity, and other steps to reverse increasing rates of childhood obesity," noted Denise Simons-Morton, Ph.D., director of the NHLBI's Division for the Application of Research Discoveries. "This study will evaluate such community programs to determine which of them or their components a
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| Contact: NHLBI Office of Communications nhlbi_news@nhlbi.nih.gov 301-496-4236 NIH/National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute Source:Eurekalert |