Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health

Featured Projects


    Lynda Lisabeth, PhD
    Associate Professor, Epidemiology

    The Brain Attack Surveillance in Corpus Christi (BASIC) Project

    The Brain Attack Surveillance in Corpus Christi (BASIC) Project is an ongoing population-based stroke surveillance study conducted in South Texas, with the goal of delineating and explaining the stroke burden in Mexican Americans compared with non-Hispanic whites. The study has resulted in over 40 manuscripts and has made many important discoveries about stroke in Mexican Americans over the past ten years, including an understanding of ethnic differences in stroke incidence, post-stroke mortality, and risk of stroke recurrence. The BASIC Project, which is currently funded by NINDS-NIH through 2014, is positioned to continue to provide new insights regarding stroke in the Mexican American population. For the first time, the project now follows stroke patients longitudinally with the objective of characterizing ethnic differences in stroke outcomes, including functional, neurologic and cognitive outcomes. This holds the potential to inform strategies to improve stroke outcomes in Mexican Americans. The BASIC Project was also recently expanded through a grant from NHLBI to include sleep apnea screening. The goal of BASIC SLEEP is to study the epidemiology of sleep apnea after stroke, with a focus on Mexican Americans. This research builds on the growing evidence that sleep disordered breathing influences stroke risk. This novel topic is an important research avenue as more than half of stroke patients have sleep apnea, an independent stroke risk factor and potentially a risk factor for poor stroke outcome. Yet, little is known about sleep apnea in Hispanics and sleep apnea’s potential contribution to the excess stroke burden in Mexican Americans. Identification of environmental/lifestyle factors which explain ethnic differences in sleep apnea through this research will guide interventions to prevent or improve sleep apnea in Mexican Americans and in turn, lessen the stroke disparity.