With support from a previous RFA (Centers for Mind/Body Interactions and Health program), the Michigan Interdisciplinary Center on Social Inequalities, Mind, and Body (MiCSIMB; P50 HD038986) created a set of unique and productive collaborative activities that have been examining the interactions of psychosocial states (beliefs, attitudes, affective states, values, and social relationships), their determinants, stress, and pathophysiologic markers of stress in the development of physical and mental disorders, in child development, and in aging. With a focus that included studies of socioeconomic and racial inequalities in health, life-course and neighborhood/community determinants, methodological and biostatistical advances, and a focus on population-based samples of children and adults, men and women, whites and minorities, the MiCSIMB has dramatically expanded the scope of mind-body research. In doing so it has created a rich interdisciplinary group with representation from epidemiology, sociology, economics, psychiatry, medicine, child development, internal medicine, health behavior and health education, public policy, social work, biostatistics, and education. We now seek support though the NIH Mind-Body Interactions and Health: Research Infrastructure Program to support a continuation of this remarkable interdisciplinary accomplishment in order to enhance the quality and quantity of mind-body research, to promote innovative interdisciplinary approaches bridging the biological and social determinants of health and health disparities, and to continue to develop an expanded view of mind-body research that links to public health and other disciplines. This will be accomplished via a network of over 40 investigators representing 12 disciplines, and an infrastructure that provides core services and expertise linking these investigators and data sets across disciplines, that supports research enhancements and pilot projects enabling researchers to come together across studies to examine central concerns in this expanded view of mind-body research, and through the use of in-hand data sets representing diverse populations of over 200,000 people with measurement across studies of psychosocial states and their determinants, emotions, stress, behavior, socioeconomic position, attitudes, cognitions, personality, social connections, genetic factors, and the biological pathways that link these characteristics to health outcomes across the life span. A significant feature of these projects is the rich amount of data across studies in which to examine race/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in health, neighborhood and community characteristics, and life course determinants of health and health inequalities.
For more information please contact: George Kaplan.