Research misconduct and consequential harms have been inflicted upon American Indian/Alaska Native communities for decades. To protect their people and culture and to retain oversight over research, many Native communities have established tribal health research and institutional review boards. The Treatment Options for Type 2 Diabetes in Adolescents and Youth (TODAY) Study showcases a successful, trusting research collaboration with tribal nations and academic investigators in Oklahoma.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The prevalence and socioeconomic burden of childhood obesity and diabetes has increased rapidly in the United States in the last 30 years. American Indians have the highest prevalence of type 2 diabetes among newly diagnosed youth in the country. Contributing factors include environmental, behavioral, and genetic components.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: American Indians (AI) have high prevalence of diabetes in youth and may benefit from increasing physical activity as a strategy to improve metabolic health. We tested whether financial incentives would elicit greater frequency and/or duration of exercise in AI youth at high risk for developing diabetes. Overweight/obese AI boys and girls, 11-20 years old, were instructed to exercise on 3 days/week for 48 weeks at a tribal wellness center.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe prohibitin 3' untranslated region (3'UTR) belongs to a novel class of non-coding regulatory RNAs. It arrests cell cycle progression by blocking G1-S transition in breast and other cancers. Our previous studies comparing MCF7 derived clones constitutively expressing a common allelic form of prohibitin RNA (UTR/C) to various controls demonstrated that it functions as a tumor suppressor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCommon, but weakly penetrant, functional polymorphisms probably account for most of the genetic risk for breast cancer in the general population. Current polygenic risk models assume that component genes act independently. To test for potential gene-gene interactions, single nucleotide polymorphisms in ten genes with known or predicted roles in breast carcinogenesis were examined in a case-control study of 631 Caucasian women diagnosed with breast cancer under the age of 53 years and 1,504 controls under the age of 53 years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProhibitin is a candidate tumor suppressor gene located on human chromosome 17q21, a region of frequent loss of heterozygosity in breast cancers. We showed previously that microinjection of RNA encoded by the prohibitin gene 3'untranslated region (3'UTR) blocks the G(1)-S transition causing cell cycle arrest in several human cancer cell lines, including MCF7. Two allelic forms (C versus T) of the prohibitin 3'UTR exist, and carriers of the less common variant (Tallele) with a family history of breast cancer exhibited an increased risk of breast cancer.
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