SCGH Progress Report: Johnson and Diabetes Free Riverside; Gatto’s Parkinson’s Study

Diabetes Free Riverside

Curing obesity and Type 2 Diabetes doesn’t happen overnight.

In 2014, Professor and founding dean of the School of Community & Global Health Andy Johnson started a push for education and prevention in the Inland Empire with “Diabetes Free Riverside.”

The program partners CGU with Riverside County and the Community Translational Research Institute.

For the past three years, the program has included health screenings and interventions at the individual, family, and community levels.

Recently Johnson was awarded a grant through Riverside County to continue with this project which aims to show that a comprehensive, community-wide program can have a decided impact on general public health behavior.

For more about Professor Johnson’s work with this project, see https://www.cgu.edu/news/2014/12/diabetes-free-riverside/

Parkinson’s and California Teachers

Nicole Gatto, associate professor and director of the Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) Program, recently received a small grant award for a research project titled “Second Follow-Back Study on Additional New Onset Parkinson’s Cases Identified in the California Teachers Study.”

Supported by the American Parkinson’s Disease Association, the award funds Gatto’s collaborative research with UCLA and USC on the California Teachers Study, a cohort study of some 133,000 female public school teachers and administrators started in 1995 that collects health data.

The grant provides Gatto with support for graduate student researchers in an effort to verify Parkinson’s diagnosis among women who reported the disease on a questionnaire. The project is the second of its kind and will provide important data for future analyses aimed at understanding risk factors for the disease.