The Michigan Daily recently published an article about the termination of a grant that sought to reinterview the National Survey of American Life (NSAL) to assess cognitive functioning and dementia risk. The grant, which is led by co-PI’s Briana Mezuk and Toni Antonucci, was terminated in March on the grounds of ‘no longer effectuat[ing] agency priorities,’ despite dementia research and prevention being a cornerstone of NIH’s scientitfic agenda. The NSAL is the largest nationally-representative survey of Black Americans to date and has been an essential tool for researchers studying the health and wellbeing of Black and lower-income White Americans. This study was an urgently-needed opportunity to generate novel data on cognitive outcomes among Black Americans, who are twice as likely as White patients to develop dementia.

The article, written by Grace Schuur, provides an essential overview of the study and features interviews from Dr. Mezuk, Dr. Antonucci, and PhD students Eskira Kahsay and Cheyenne Garcia on the human and scientific cost of the termination. You can read the full article here.

Earlier this month, Chuwen (Cullen) Zhong and Eskira Kahsay attended the American Association of Suicidology (AAS) Annual Conference in Columbus, Ohio. Cullen presented her work on perinatal suicide prevention with her presentation: “Investigating Complex Relationship Between Circumstances of Suicide in Perinatal Women using the NVDRS: A Network Analysis”. Overall, the AAS meeting was a great opportunity to discuss our research with a broader audience focused on suicide prevention. Great work to Cullen and Eskira!

We are very excited to share that the protocol for the Diabetes, Distress, and Disparities (3D) Study has been published in BMJ Open! The 3D study was mixed methods survey that aimed to quantify and understand the psychosocial care needs and barriers facing people with diabetes (PWD) within a large healthcare setting (i.e., Michigan Medicine).

The 3D study was led by Dr. Mezuk and the Diabetes and Mental Health (DMH) Initiative team and was supported by funding from the Caswell Diabetes Institute here at UM. You can read the full paper here.

Earlier this month, GREMAP research staff Chuwen (Cullen) Zhong attended the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry (AAGP) Annual Conference in Phoenix, AZ! Cullen presented her work that uses network analysis to examine the association between depressive symptoms, social isolation, and physical functioning among older adults. The AAGP meeting was a great opportunity to discuss this work with a diverse set of stakeholders, including many clinicians, who have a valuable perspective on how these three constructs interact in the clinical setting. Great work, Cullen!

Left: Cullen at the AAGP poster session (with refreshments!). Right: A picture of a Saguaro cactus from Cullen’s time exploring Phoenix.

We are excited to share a new blog post on prescription drug advertising written by GREMAP research coordinator Lily Johns and published in the Interdisciplinary Assocation for Population Health Sciences (IAPHS) Blog. The article explores the possibility of a federal ban on prescription drug ads, also known as direct-to-consumer advertisements (DTCA), a policy that has been promoted by recently-appointed HHS Secretary RFK Jr. In the article, which is titled “Selling Health, Selling Illness, or Just Selling Drugs? A Look at a Potential Ban on Prescription Drug Ads”, Lily incorporates evidence from research and prior policies to provide further context to this potential ban and the—both positive and negative—impacts that it could have on public health. You can read the full article here.

We are excited to share that this year’s Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Reserach (MCUAAAR) Spring Conference will feature multiple presentations from GREMAP’s facutly and students. Starting off, GREMAP PhD student Eskira Kahsay will open the event with her talk “The Nexus of Racial Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Deprivation: Exploring Suicide Risk Among Black Americans”, which explores her dissertation work on the mental health impacts of residential segregation. Later, Dr. Briana Mezuk will be leading the conference’s faculty presentation with her talk on the newly-funded re-interview of the National Survey of American Life (NSAL) titled “Planning for the National Survey of American Life 2.0”. The spring conference will also feature presentations by MCUAAAR research scientists Drs. Nekehia T. Quashie, Myles Durkee, and Carrie Leach on a variety of topics related to the health and wellbeing of Black Americans and older adults.

The event will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, April 9th from 9:00 am – 12:30 pm ET. You can register for the conference with the link here.

We are excited to announce that folks from the ATLAS project team have been awarded third place in a Driven Data competition aimed at improving the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), the nation’s most comprehensive registry of suicide mortality and a core dataset in the ATLAS study.

The competition, hosted by Driven Data on behalf of the CDC, was titled Youth Mental Health Narratives and featured two tracks: Automated Abstraction and Novel Variables. The ATLAS team participated in the Novel Variables track, which focused on analyzing the textual data in the NVDRS narratives to identify new variables to advance research on youth suicidality.

Our final project employed a combination of qualitative (i.e., thematic analysis) and computational (i.e., natural language processing) methods to investigate youth suicidality as it relates to social media and engagement in online spaces. Specifically, we identified 5 novel variables that further describe and contextualize decedents’ social media engagement leading up to the fatal event: “Private Sharing”, “Conflict”, “Victimization”, “Withdrawal”, and “Harmful Exposure”. With these novel variables, we aim to describe non-normative online behavior, drawing on the theoretical work of Durkheim as well as the Integrated Motivational-Volitional (IMV) theory of suicide. The full project submission is detailed here.

This award was featured in a news release from the UM Institute for Social Research and the Research Center for Group Dynamics. Additionally, you can read more about the competition and other winners here. Congratulations to the team on this achievement!

The UM-ATLAS team (left to right): [top row] Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Elyse Thulin, Silas Falde, Lily Johns, Viktoryia Kalesniakva, [bottom row] Jonathan Kertawidjaja, Alejandro Rodriguez-Putnam, and Emma Spring.

Dr. Mezuk was interviewed for a recent article published in Popular Science on life expectancy and humanity’s pursuit of a long (and healthy?) life. The articles discusses key issues aging and life expectancy within the current social and cultural context, including the ways in which systemic inequalities (e.g., where you live) shape people’s outcomes as they age. You can read the full article here.