Features
The Science of Wellness
Alumni and advisors to the dean help improve lives and health on a national level
“Life sciences” conjures visions of researchers trying to cure cancer, or scientists mapping the human genome. But the life sciences are much broader, and the School of HPER and its alumni are doing important work at the forefront of the life sciences movement.
Consider the work undertaken by HPER alumni such as Donald I. Wagner, John Seffrin, Steven Blair, Laura Kann, and David McSwane. All are HPER Dean’s Associates, and in their careers, they use their knowledge, skills, and expertise to improve the health and well-being of individuals, families, and communities in Indiana and beyond. From helping people make healthy choices to conducting research that influences public policy, their contributions are shaping the future of the life sciences.
Promoting Prevention
As professor of health promotion at the University of Cincinnati, Donald I. Wagner (H.S.D. ’77) knows the importance of prevention education. In his role as director of the Center for Prevention Studies at the university, he has helped develop several initiatives that focus on prevention education for youth, families, and communities.
In 1991, Wagner helped found the Ohio Resource Network (formerly the Ohio Prevention and Education Resource Center), which provides alcohol and drug prevention training, materials, and technical assistance to youth service professionals in Ohio. As the Ohio Resource Network began to expand in the mid-‘90s, he and his colleagues saw the need for a larger umbrella organization, and in 2001 they formed the Center for Prevention Studies. Wagner later helped develop two other initiatives within the center: Family-Based Prevention, which trains early childhood educators on alcohol and drug prevention using a positive youth development framework, and BridgeBuilders, a research project that examines the elements of a successful community-based prevention coalition.
Wagner and his colleagues at the Center for Prevention Studies are developing a new initiative that deals with the prevention of childhood obesity. They hope to base the project on the Ohio Resource Center’s model of service delivery.
Wagner sees prevention education as a way to help individuals make smart choices that will help them maintain good health. “The role of health promotion, as I see it from our perspective as health educators, is to train and educate, to create more informed individuals who can make appropriate choices based on their values and the optimal health that they desire,” he says.
As CEO of the American Cancer Society, former Applied Health Science chair John Seffrin has spent a great deal of his career emphasizing the role of prevention in health care. A major part of his work has been promoting prevention as public policy, something he says is essential to addressing health care problems.
Seffrin says that society is getting closer to understanding the significance of prevention. For example, the FDA recently approved the first-ever vaccine for the human papilloma virus, the virus that causes cervical and uterine cancers. Globally, hundreds of thousands of women die of these cancers each year, and this vaccine should eventually eradicate the cancers, he says.
There has been a documented downturn in cancer mortality rates for more than a decade, says Seffrin, because of a combination of prevention and improved treatment. But, ultimately, cancer is a disease that is much more preventable than it is treatable or curable, explains Seffrin. In fact, virtually two-thirds of all cancers are preventable.
“If you intervene on even a lethal disease entity like cancer with well-thought-out, evidence-based intervention, you can get results.”
Influencing Public Policy
Steven Blair (M.S. ’65, P.E.D. ’68), former president and CEO of the Cooper Institute, had the opportunity to see his work influence public policy during his 26 years at the institute. The Cooper Institute is a nonprofit research and education foundation focused on physical activity and fitness in relation to health. During his tenure there, Blair conducted epidemiological research examining the effect of fitness on mortality rates.
Blair and his colleagues compared fitness levels of patients at the Cooper Clinic, a preventive medicine practice affiliated with the Cooper Institute, to their mortality rates. The findings were somewhat surprising.
“Our first report on fitness and mortality was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1989, and what we found is that [of] both the women and the men, those who were merely moderately fit had a death rate that was half that of the individuals who were low-fit,” he says.
According to Blair, the report influenced policy recommendations for physical activity, which began to change in the mid-’90s. Earlier recommendations had advocated vigorous exercise, but the Cooper Institute’s findings showed moderate fitness to be protective against early death. Policy statements such as the 1996 Surgeon General’s Report on Physical Activity and Health, for which Blair served as senior scientific manager, reflected these findings.
“In my mind, it’s a direct line from those research findings to these public policy statements in the mid-’90s such as the Surgeon General’s Report. I’m not saying that we take all the credit for that, but I think our work is certainly one of the things that’s been influential,” he says.
Laura Kann’s (Ph.D. ’87) work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention helps drive programs and policies that improve kids’ lives. Kann serves as Distinguished Fellow and Chief of the Surveillance and Evaluation Research Branch of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health. In her role, Kann oversees the division’s surveillance activities, including the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a nationwide survey of high school kids and their health behaviors.
The data collected from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey are used to help advocate for doing things better for kids, Kann says. For example, recent policies dealing with the content of school vending machines have been driven by data from the survey, such as percent of kids who are overweight, levels of fruit and vegetable consumption, and levels of physical activity.
“That data are working together to really paint an interesting picture about why we may need to change our programs or policies,” she says.
Kann enjoys the fact that the research has a practical application. “We’re making a difference. It’s not just data collection to write journal articles or develop theories, but it’s actually to change programs and policies that affect kids’ lives,” she says.
Educating about Safety
Education is a large part of the work of David McSwane (M.P.H. ’72, H.S.D. ’80), professor of public and environmental affairs at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. As a researcher, McSwane’s main interests are food safety and the prevention of food-borne illness. The impact of food-borne illness on public health is considerable, he says.
“The CDC in Atlanta estimates that we have somewhere in the vicinity of 76 million cases of food-borne illness every year. If you figure that we have a population of roughly 300 million, that means people’s chances of contracting a food-borne illness are roughly one in four on an annual basis,” he says.
McSwane uses his expertise in food safety to educate employees in the food service industry about how to prevent food-borne illness. He and his colleagues have developed textbooks and other training materials for use in industry training programs. He also delivers “train-the-trainer” programs that prepare potential trainers around the country to work with industry personnel. In the future, he hopes to establish a network of master trainers who can deliver these programs to as many in the industry as possible.
McSwane says that the primary message of his teaching and writing is that food-borne illness is preventable. “There’s never been a case of food-borne illness that could not have been prevented, and it’s really not rocket science in terms of what it takes,” he says. “The real key is just getting the message to the people that need it most, and that’s the people who are working in the industry”.
Serving the World
As part of her work at the CDC, Laura Kann travels to countries such as China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Republic of Congo, and United Arab Emirates to train health professionals to administer the Global School-Based Student Health Survey, an international version of the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Though the global survey system is just a few years old, participating countries are already starting to amass data, which can be used to drive programs and policies that benefit youth in those countries.
Kann says that the best part of leading the training is working with people who are eager to learn. “It’s a real honor to get to share what we know and what we do here with them and help further what they want to do for their kids,” she says.
Donald Wagner, of the University of Cincinnati, has shared his expertise in health promotion with developing countries in Latin America. In the mid ’80s, while serving as a Kellogg Fellow in international development, he began working with Partners of the Americas, a nonprofit international development organization. As a result of his experience with Partners, he was asked to serve as Senior Advisor for Health Promotion to the Brazilian Ministry of Health, helping create a national plan for health promotion.
While in Brazil, Wagner also worked on smoking cessation and tobacco education initiatives and served as consultant to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Fund on various projects. Later he acted as consultant to Belize in the development of HIV education initiatives.
Wagner recalls that there were some cultural differences surrounding the role of health promotion. “I did a lot of training while I was in Brazil because health promotion was not a common term, let alone an understood activity,” he says. Wagner’s experiences in Latin America inspired him to remain involved with Partners of the Americas, and upon his return to the United States, he joined its board of directors, later serving as chair.
The ultimate goal of IU’s Life Sciences Initiative, says McSwane of IUPUI, is to improve health and well-being, and that is consistent with the mission of the School of HPER.
“In the end, I think the goal we’re all looking for is maintaining a higher level of wellness and health, and that is whether we’re using the life sciences strategy or whether we’re using one of these more conventional wellness-based or prevention-based approaches. The result is hopefully still going to be the same, and that’s going to be a better place to live and a higher quality of life and longer life expectancy.”
2005–2006 School of HPER Dean’s Associates
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