Acute respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation in an intensive care unit (ICU) is common, affecting almost 800,000 people each year. With survival from acute respiratory failure improving over time, research on quality of life among ICU survivors and their family members has become increasingly important. To date, this research has mainly focused on the negative experiences of survivors and their family members, including long-term psychological symptoms of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. In other areas of patient survivorship, including cancer and trauma, studies have shown that survivors may respond with psychological adaptations that enable them to experience positive changes in the context of their disease. These psychological adaptations include resilience, post-traumatic growth and benefit finding. A better understanding of the factors that define and influence patients’ and families’ psychological adaptations to the experience of illness, as well as the association between these psychological adaptations and outcomes provides a novel opportunity to develop interventions to improve patient- and family-centered outcomes following acute respiratory failure. Specific aims for this study are: (1) To determine patient characteristics associated with positive psychological adaptation in patient survivors of acute respiratory failure; (2) To determine family characteristics and ICU processes of care associated with positive psychological adaptation in family members; and (3) To determine the association between patient and family psychological adaptation and patient and family long-term outcomes including quality of life, adverse psychological symptoms and healthcare utilization.

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Sustainability via Active Garden Education (SAGE) is a garden based physical activity and nutrition intervention for preschool-aged children. The SAGE curriculum uses a school garden as a metaphor for child development and engages children in interactive games, songs, and learning activities. The SAGE curriculum focuses on improving physical activity, sedentary behaviors, fruit, and vegetable consumption, reducing eating in the absence of hunger, and also encourages healthy behavior changes and parenting practices in parents. The SAGE study incorporates community-based participatory research strategies into an ecologic approach to investigate factors needed to initiate and maintain PA and healthy dietary habits in the preschool setting while exploring the potential for sustainability for broad scale implementation and informing policy enactment and enforcement. 

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Designed to build greater capacity among health and social service providers acrosee Arizona to care for Femal Genitalia Cutting affected populations and build community knowledge and awareness of FGC-related health issues and available services.

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The award, which is the first PCORI award for ASU, will allow the research team to build a broad-based coalition to address the care-coordination needs of children with special health-care needs (CSHCN) and their families. The children who are the focus of the project have chronic physical, developmental, behavioral or emotional conditions that require health care and related services beyond what is typically required for children without these conditions. This project is designed to address the families’ needs for care coordination through creating a statewide (Arizona) system that can be tested through patient-centered outcomes research. 

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For patients and their intimate partners, cancer poses significant physical and emotional challenges that can negatively impact both individuals and the couple as a whole. Accumulating evidence suggests that couples’ ability to communicate effectively, or lack thereof, plays a major role in the psychological adjustment of both individuals and the quality of their relationship. Two key conceptual models have been proposed to account for how communication difficulties lead to poorer outcomes: the social-cognitive processing model and the relationship intimacy model. These models posit different mechanisms and processes affecting outcomes, and thus have substantially different implications for intervention. The purpose of the proposed project is to test and compare the utility of these models using comprehensive and methodologically rigorous methods. Findings from this study have the potential to advance relationship science and our understanding of the processes through which interpersonal communication affects patient and partner adaptation to cancer. Our long-term goal is to use the results to inform theory, measurement, and the design and implementation of efficacious interventions aimed at optimizing both patient and partner well-being.

The study will test the effectiveness of a year-long, culturally-grounded, lifestyle intervention program for reducing diabetes risk in obese Latino adolescents with prediabetic diagnosis and plans to enroll 120 adolescents to be randomly assigned to a community-based diabetes prevention program or a usual care control group.

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Develop a smartphone application using Geographical Information System (GIS) mapping to identify physical and social supports for health promotion and disease prevention in Maryvale, AZ.

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Develop and test the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of a family-based diabetes prevention program for high-risk Latino families in Maryvale, AZ.

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To explore markers of inflammation associated with metabolic syndrome in survivors of childhood cancer.

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