A team of Northern Arizona University-led researchers is using nearly $1.3 million in new funding from the National Institutes of Health to continue with the world's longest-running study on obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
Obesity and diabetes have been described as the major public health concerns of the 21st century, explains Leslie Schulz, executive dean of NAU's College of Health and Human Services and the study's principal investigator. "This study is taking those necessary steps toward finding a way to protect people against the development of these pervasive diseases," she says.
Schulz is being joined by researchers from the National Institutes of Health, the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Mexico's Center for the Investigation of Nutrition and Development.
A related study already has shown that Pima Indians in Arizona—who have a diet and lifestyle similar to most Americans—have a much higher rate of diabetes than the national average: 38 percent versus 8 percent nationally, giving them the distinction of being the most diabetes-prone group in the world.
The Arizona Pima Indians have been genetically linked to a village of Pima Indians living a more traditional lifestyle in a remote, mountainous region of Mexico. A 1995 study of the Mexican Pimas revealed only a rare occurrence of diabetes. Schulz explains that the genetic similarities between the two groups of Pima Indians, along with the contrast in their lifestyles, provides an ideal setting to study the relationship between environmental circumstances and diabetes.
The researchers returned in the fall after 15 years to the Mexican village to study the relationship between the Mexican Pima Indians' increasingly "westernized" lifestyle and their genetic predisposition for obesity and diabetes.
"Since we were last there, the environmental circumstances of the village have changed," Schulz says, explaining how the electrical supply to the region has increased, cars have become more prevalent and grocery stores have appeared.
She points out that this changing environment affects non-Pima Mexicans who also live in the village as much as it does the Mexican Pima Indians living there.
"These two groups of people have undergone the same lifestyle changes over the past 15 years but they have different genes," Schulz explains. "Therefore, we hope to separate out the role genes play versus the role lifestyle plays."
Schulz says the team of researchers will spend weeks at a time over the next two years living and working in "rustic" conditions in the Mexican village. There they will collect and record data, such as residents' height, weight, diet and physical activity, and determine whether or not the residents have diabetes.