Stanford School of Medicine has won a $12.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to pilot and develop an unusually long-term program to combat childhood obesity, potentially leading the way for other programs in the future nationwide.
The grant comes as part of the NIH’s $49.5 million Childhood Obesity Prevention and Treatment Research (COPTR) program. Three other universities — Vanderbilt, University of Minnesota Twin-Cities and Case Western — also received COPTR grants.
Thomas Robinson M.D. ’88, director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, will lead the research team designing the program.
“[Dr. Robinson] has done a lot of really superb groundwork with families, schools and communities,” said Fernando Mendoza M.D. ’75, a professor of pediatrics who researches childhood obesity. “We tend to set out a standard format. Clearly there are a lot of ways to lose weight…Tom’s program is holistic. It takes all those things into account.”
The Center for Healthy Weight’s current intensive six-month program helps 80 percent of its participants shed excess weight through fun, stealthy interventions like dancing and soccer.
“That model works well for the families able to do it,” Robinson said. “The new program will be in a community setting because, for some families, they have no availability or there’s [no program] in their area.”
The seven-year grant will finance a new study following 240 obese children between the ages of 7 and 12, as well as their families, for three years. Participants will be drawn from local towns like East Palo Alto, Redwood City and East Menlo Park.
Read the full story at the Stanford Daily.
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