Izzuddin Aris, PhD
Associate Professor,
Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute
Featured in the Session: Maternal Metabolic Imprinting: New Insights on Developmental Origins of Diabetes and Obesity
When
Monday, June 8
at 8:00 a.m. CT
Where
217 (Level 2)
Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
What is your presentation about?
Social determinants of health have been highlighted as research priorities to identify risk and resilience factors for poor health outcomes. Neighborhoods are an especially relevant social determinant as they possess both physical and social attributes that may affect health directly or by modifying individual-level factors. However, few studies have examined the extent to which neighborhood conditions during early life—at birth, in infancy, or in early childhood, which are key life stages that lay the foundation for long-term health outcomes—are associated with metabolic risk across childhood to adolescence. Even fewer studies have attempted to ascertain these relationships in racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse populations. This presentation will highlight recent findings from a large U.S. cohort consortium (ECHO: Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes) that directly addresses these research gaps and illustrate how early-life neighborhood environments may shape metabolic health outcomes across childhood.
How do you hope your presentation will impact diabetes research or care?
Poorer metabolic health in childhood—characterized by obesity, high blood pressure, and dyslipidemia—significantly accelerates diabetes risk. A deeper understanding of the relationship between early-life neighborhood environments and childhood metabolic health would thus be important to inform prevention strategies that directly address the disparate contexts of neighborhoods, reduce barriers and improve access to essential resources, and provide families with the environments needed to support optimal childhood health and well-being.
How did you become involved with this area of diabetes research or care?
My work currently focuses on the paradigm of the developmental origins of health and disease, with an overall goal of quantifying the extent to which early-life risk factors at critical developmental periods during the lifecourse affect important health outcomes including obesity and diabetes.