Current Activities of the Prevention Research Center

Current funded projects include smoking cessation in youths, reducing tobacco exposure in pregnancy and in infancy, Office on Women’s Health Bodyworks Program evaluation, evaluating at risk populations, using geographic information systems, work with the MidAtlantic Public Health Training Center, also, work with the Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive center.

Key areas of research in the PRC include:

• minority health;
• prevention of tobacco use, cessation and reduction;
• adolescent sexuality;
• youth violence prevention;
• Reducing health disparities
• School health

The Center for Health and Health Care in the Schools (CHHCS), directed by Dr. Julia Lear, is affiliated with the Prevention Research Center. It is a nonpartisan resource center at The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. CHHCS builds on a 20-year commitment to achieve better health outcomes for children and adolescents through school-connected health programs and services.

The Center pursues this commitment by linking educators and health professionals to the information essential to building effective school health programs; testing new school-connected strategies to achieve better health outcomes for children, and promoting awareness of successful new directions in school-based programming.

Health programs range from those that help students adopt healthy habits to those that foster a physically and emotionally healthy school environment. School-based services include physical and mental health care, dental services, screenings and referrals to community resources, as well as school-located services to support students with special needs.

Current and recent projects undertaken by the Center include

• helping school and health personnel assist newcomer children and their families reduce emotional and behavioral health problems through community partnerships;
• assisting a community service agency and local mental health department design an evaluation for their school mental health program, and
• developing a policy options paper for a state considering a school-based health center initiative.

The Center's 2,500-page website, healthinschools.org, provides up-to-date information for health professionals, educators and families to assist in promoting the health of children through school-connected programs. No advertising is accepted for the web site.

Minority health, Project DC HOPE, directed by Dr. Ayman El Mohandes, is a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional community-based research program addressing multiple risks in minority pregnant women. Now in its fifth year, the program is designed to test the efficacy of an integrated behavioral intervention to reduce the risk of smoking (both active and passive exposure), depression, and intimate partner violence during pregnancy. Eight hundred and twenty minority pregnant women from the District of Columbia have been recruited to this study so far and the project has been given a funded extension by NICHD for an additional year.

Tobacco cessation and reduction, Drs. El Mohandes, Windsor, Boyd and Blake are currently engaged in proposing to the NICHD another multi-institutional clinical trial to test the efficacy of nicotine replacement therapy in reducing smoking during pregnancy in a highly addicted group of pregnant mothers. This project will include the department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine and the Clinical Research Institute at Children's Hospital.

The Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is a project funded by NIAAA and is in a pilot phase. This project is designed to assess the prevalence of alcohol exposure in minority district pregnant women in the District of Columbia, linking these behaviors to pregnancy complications and reproductive outcomes. This is a collaborative project with Georgetown University and Dr. El Mohandes is the PI for the GWU site.

Cancer screening and early intervention, Dr. Mona Sarfaty serves as the Medical Director for the Montgomery County Colorectal Cancer Program, a program of education, prevention, screening and treatment for colorectal cancer targeted for low income, uninsured, and minority residents of Montgomery County, Maryland. This program, a community collaboration funded through the Maryland Department of Health, is reaching the end of its second year of operations and will continue until 2010.