Dr. Forgive Avorgbedor knows that keeping families healthy extends well beyond preventing childhood obesity.
The UNCG Nursing professor has joined forces with Dr. Esther Leerkes and Dr. Laura Wideman to use UNCG’s iGrow data to better understand how structural racism influences the health of childbearing parents, particularly during and after childbirth. They’re particularly interested in how pregnancy-related heart and metabolic issues can lead to future heart disease. Arterial stiffness – a strong predictor of heart disease – affects 47.3 percent of African American women, according to the National Institutes of Health.
The iGrow – Infant Growth and Development – study followed approximately 300 children from the womb to age two, along with their families, and broke ground as one of the first research studies to simultaneously examine the biological, psychological, and social factors that could raise obesity risk from infancy through toddlerhood.
With $500,000 in funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Avorgbedor’s team will examine structural racism using multiple pathways, at both the contextual and individual level. While she says researchers already have some knowledge of how discrimination contributes to adverse outcomes in Black women, the team aims to provide a deeper understanding of the specific risk of cardiovascular disease that Black women face due to their environment.
They will also test parents for risk of cardiovascular disease using an advanced instrument called the Vicorder, which tracks pulse wave velocity, a measure of arterial stiffness. Avorgbedor envisions using the study’s results to design an easily implemented intervention. Rather than waiting for childbearing parents to be diagnosed with hypertensive disorders during pregnancy or postpartum, arterial stiffness might be discovered early enough to prevent heart disease.