Sherman A. James is an American epidemiologist. He is the Susan B. King Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, and previously taught at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill from 1973 to 1989 and at the University of Michigan as the John P. Kirscht Collegiate Professor of Public Health from 1989 to 2003. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2000. [1] [2] [3]
James received an A.B. degree (psychology and philosophy) from Talladega College in 1964 [4] and a Ph.D. in psychology from Washington University in St. Louis in 1973. [5]
James is known for conceiving the term John Henryism in the 1970s. [6]
Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution, patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population.
The Framingham Heart Study is a long-term, ongoing cardiovascular cohort study of residents of the city of Framingham, Massachusetts. The study began in 1948 with 5,209 adult subjects from Framingham, and is now on its third generation of participants. Prior to the study almost nothing was known about the epidemiology of hypertensive or arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Much of the now-common knowledge concerning heart disease, such as the effects of diet, exercise, and common medications such as aspirin, is based on this longitudinal study. It is a project of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, in collaboration with Boston University. Various health professionals from the hospitals and universities of Greater Boston staff the project.
Birth weight is the body weight of a baby at their birth. The average birth weight in babies of European and African descent is 3.5 kilograms (7.7 lb), with the normative range between 2.5 and 4.0 kilograms. On average, babies of Asian descent weigh about 3.25 kilograms (7.2 lb). The prevalence of low birth weight has changed over time. Trends show a slight decrease from 7.9% (1970) to 6.8% (1980), then a slight increase to 8.3% (2006), to the current levels of 8.2% (2016). The prevalence of low birth weights has trended slightly upward from 2012 to the present.
Multimorbidity, also known as multiple long-term conditions (MLTC), means living with two or more chronic illnesses. For example, a person could have diabetes, heart disease and depression at the same time. Multimorbidity can have a significant impact on people's health and wellbeing. It also poses a complex challenge to healthcare systems which are traditionally focused on individual diseases. Multiple long-term conditions can affect people of any age, but they are more common in older age, affecting more than half of people over 65 years old.
Social medicine is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the profound interplay between socio-economic factors and individual health outcomes. Rooted in the challenges of the Industrial Revolution, it seeks to:
Christopher Dye FRS, FMedSci is a biologist, epidemiologist and public health specialist. He is Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and formerly Director of Strategy at the World Health Organization.
Obesity is a risk factor for many chronic physical and mental illnesses.
Social stress is stress that stems from one's relationships with others and from the social environment in general. Based on the appraisal theory of emotion, stress arises when a person evaluates a situation as personally relevant and perceives that they do not have the resources to cope or handle the specific situation.
Molecular pathological epidemiology is a discipline combining epidemiology and pathology. It is defined as "epidemiology of molecular pathology and heterogeneity of disease". Pathology and epidemiology share the same goal of elucidating etiology of disease, and MPE aims to achieve this goal at molecular, individual and population levels. Typically, MPE utilizes tissue pathology resources and data within existing epidemiology studies. Molecular epidemiology broadly encompasses MPE and conventional-type molecular epidemiology with the use of traditional disease designation systems.
Sarah Cleaveland is a veterinary surgeon and Professor of Comparative Epidemiology at the University of Glasgow.
Kenneth Dodge is the William McDougall Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. He is also the founding and past director of the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy and founder of Family Connects International.
Jeffrey W. Swanson is an American medical sociologist and professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. He is an expert in psychiatric epidemiology, especially as regards the epidemiology of violence and serious mental illness.
Myrna Milgram Weissman is Diane Goldman Kemper Family Professor of Epidemiology in Psychiatry at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and Chief of the Division of Translational Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She is an epidemiologist known for her research on the prevalence of psychiatric disorders and psychiatric epidemiology, as it pertains to rates and risks of anxiety and mood disorders across generations. Among her many influential works are longitudinal studies of the impact of parental depression on their children.
Arline Geronimus wrote about the weathering hypothesis the early 1990s to account for health disparities of newborn babies and birth mothers due to decades and generations of racism and social, economic, and political oppression. It is well documented that people of color and other marginalized communities have worse health outcomes than white people. This is due to multiple stressors including prejudice, social alienation, institutional bias, political oppression, economic exclusion, and racial discrimination. The weathering hypothesis proposes that the cumulative burden of these stressors as individuals age is "weathering", and the increased weathering experienced by minority groups compared to others can account for differences in health outcomes. In recent years, social scientists investigated the biological plausibility of the weathering hypothesis in studies evaluating the physiological effects of social, environmental and political stressors among marginalized communities. The weathering hypothesis is more widely accepted as a framework for explaining health disparities on the basis of differential exposure to racially based stressors. Researchers have also identified patterns connecting weathering to biological phenomena associated with stress and aging, such as allostatic load, epigenetics, telomere shortening, and accelerated brain aging.
Kathleen Ries Merikangas is the Chief of the Genetic Epidemiology Research Branch in the Intramural Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and an adjunct professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has published more than 300 papers, and is best known for her work in adolescent mental disorders.
Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo is an American epidemiologist and physician. She is the 17th Editor in Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the JAMA Network. She is Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Lee Goldman, MD Endowed Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco. She is a general internist and attending physician at San Francisco General Hospital.
Elizabeth Louise Barrett-Connor was Chief of the Division of Epidemiology and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego. She investigated the role of hormones in pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and osteoporosis.
Maria DeJoseph Van Kerkhove is an American infectious disease epidemiologist. With a background in high-threat pathogens, Van Kerkhove specializes in emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases and is based in the Health Emergencies Program at the World Health Organization (WHO). She is the technical lead of COVID-19 response and the head of emerging diseases and zoonosis unit at WHO.
Katie A. McLaughlin is an American clinical psychologist and expert on how stress, trauma, and other adverse events, such as natural disorders or pandemics, affect behavioral and brain development during childhood and adolescence. McLaughlin is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.
The psychological impact of discrimination on health refers to the cognitive pathways through which discrimination impacts mental and physical health in members of marginalized, subordinate, and low-status groups. Research on the relation between discrimination and health became a topic of interest in the 1990s, when researchers proposed that persisting racial/ethnic disparities in health outcomes could potentially be explained by racial/ethnic differences in experiences with discrimination. Although the bulk of the research tend to focus on the interactions between interpersonal discrimination and health, researchers studying discrimination and health in the United States have proposed that institutional discrimination and cultural racism also give rise to conditions that contribute to persisting racial and economic health disparities.