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JOSHUA JOSEPH: My name is Joshua Joseph, and I am a physician scientist here at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. I am trained as a translational epidemiologist. So much of my work has focused around traditional lifestyle behaviors, but also novel risk factors for chronic diseases, including renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system and cortisol, and combining these two together, thinking about our traditional risk factors and our novel risk factors in approaches that will impact communities.
In the multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis, we did show that when we look at ideal cardiovascular health, we think about seven factors that we know lower the risk of heart disease. And those seven factors are physical activity, diet, as well as smoking-- and we call those lifestyle behaviors-- we have body mass index, or weight, and then we have glucose, cholesterol, as well as blood pressure.
And we examined diabetes risk over 10 years. And what we showed was that those who had four or more of the levels in the ideal range were at a 75% lower risk of developing diabetes over 10 years. And then in this follow-up study that we did in the Regards cohort, we were interested in whether the risk of diabetes varies by somebody's glycemic status at baseline. So we studied those who had normal fasting glucose versus impaired fasting glucose.
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Which speaks to the fact that among those individuals who are already on the pathway to developing diabetes, in this case, impaired fasting glucose, we may need higher level interventions. So now we take a number of efforts to kind of practice what we preach. So we have one study that looks at cooking matters for diabetes. It's a six week study focused on improving nutritional intake among those with diabetes. We have a second program that is starting at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, where we will be referring our patients out into the community for physical activity. This is an 11 week intervention.
And then third, we are focusing on some of our populations that we know are at highest risk. So one of those populations is African-Americans. So we have partnered with the African-American Male Wellness Initiative in an Ohio State University Connect and Collaborate Grant to impact the lives of 100 African-American men through promotion of ideal cardiovascular health, or in the community, what we call Life's Simple Seven, with the goal of increasing lifespan and improving premature mortality among African-American men.
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