The Milken Institute School of Public Health will partner with an Armenian university to research the prevention of chronic diseases like cancer and cardiovascular disease for the next five years, officials announced last month.
Milken and the American University of Armenia Turpanjian College of Health Sciences, or AUA, in Yerevan, Armenia, will annually enroll five to six Armenian students to take courses on chronic diseases from Milken and AUA faculty and conduct research between September 2023 and 2027 on AUA’s campus. Carla Berg, a principal investigator of the project, said the institutions aim to develop a formal prevention program for noncommunicable diseases, or NCDs — diseases like heart disease and diabetes that do not spread through infection — allowing both institutions to share research findings to help inform health policy related to NCD prevention.
Unhealthy eating habits, smoking tobacco, infrequent exercise and high alcohol consumption are the behavioral origins of susceptibility to NCDs. Generational poverty can also increase the risk of developing NCDs because of insufficient access to health care, indicating the growing need for global research into their prevention, according to a 2023 study published in the National Library of Medicine.
“We hope to enhance research capacity related to NCD prevention and control, emphasizing social determinants of NCD risk factors,” Berg, a professor of prevention and community health at GW, said in an email.
Berg said selected Armenian citizens studying medicine receive covered tuition from the U.S National Institute of Health Fogarty International Center and additional funds to conduct research. Principal investigators Berg and Nino Paichadze, Milken professors, and AUA professor Varduhi Petrosyan are leading the project.
Berg said researchers want to share practices that mitigate the development of NCDs, like improving social conditions and reducing tobacco and alcohol consumption, to advance their research. She said the program looks to widen the scope of research into NCD prevention with the students launching research careers focused on NCDs at the end of the program’s five years.
AUA held the introductory meeting for the program from Oct. 9 to 11 where program leaders convened to share their research findings related to NCDs, like the high risk of NCD development linked with global tobacco use, with participating students who will research similar topics.
“One of my mottos is, ‘To whom much is given, much will be required,’” Berg said. “I feel like it is incumbent on countries with resources and expertise to share and elevate our neighbors around the globe.”
Experts in global health and NCDs said cooperation and education across national borders is crucial to advancing research into NCDs, which affect people globally.
Olatunji Alese, an associate professor of hematology and medical oncology at Emory University, said international partnerships can be beneficial in reducing the time required to make necessary medical breakthroughs to help patients.
“Being able to collaborate with investigators, clinicians all over the world is advantageous because that way there can be a rapid translation of advances toward patient benefit,” Alese said. “Literally reducing the time it takes for such discoveries, usually in the lab, to be translated into actually helping patients at the bedside.”
Alese said mentored research ensures that medical students are equipped to respond to current circumstances in global health, like the increasing of chronic degenerative diseases like cancer and progress toward treatment of infectious disease in developed countries.
“One of the biggest ways to improve outcomes is training the next generation of health care providers,” Alese said. “That’s no no-brainer. Making sure there is adequate education and training for the next generation of oncologists not just in the U.S., but globally, is extremely important.”
Cher Dallal, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Maryland, said the rising toll of global deaths caused by NCDs indicates the growing need to study their prevention.
“Educating medical students on noncommunicable diseases, and particularly the risk factors for these diseases, such as obesity and physical inactivity, is crucial for prevention and ultimately, reducing mortality rates and improving the overall health of adults worldwide,” Dallal said in an email.
Dallal said there are specific benefits to studying these diseases from a global perspective, like progressing research regarding cancer control and prevention. She said global inequalities in socioeconomic factors like health care access influence the likelihood of developing a NCD.
“Incidence and mortality rates for cancer differ globally with documented geographical heterogeneity,” Dallal said. “These differences are, in part, due to the distribution and prevalence of risk factors, screening modalities, access to care, social determinants of health and other potential factors.”
Caryn Peterson, an assistant research professor studying epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said studying NCDs from a socioeconomic perspective can help researchers understand the global health disparities that countries experience and can inform policies of targeted prevention. She said structural factors like access to quality health care and an individual’s exposure to risks like air pollution can increase susceptibility to NCDs.
“All of these things play a huge role and to ignore them is to create an incomplete picture of the cause of disease and in particular, the cause of health disparities,” Peterson said.