A new childhood obesity research center has been launched by the University of Kansas Medical Center and Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics, KU Med officials announced this week.
The Center for Children’s Healthy Lifestyles & Nutrition — housed at the Donald Chisholm Center at Children’s Mercy — is aimed at pooling the resources and data of the two institutions. Officials said it brings together several existing programs and the three faculty members who run them. Among the programs are:
• Zoom to Health — A six-week Children’s Mercy program run by Dr. Meredith Dreyer that provides parenting skills and nutrition information to parents of obese children ages two to eight.
• Promoting Health in Teens and Kids (PHIT Kids) — A two-year program at Children’s Mercy aimed at poor and minority children ages nine to 18, run by Drs. Sarah Hampl and Dreyer. Trained community educators help obese kids develop new behaviors, diets and exercise routines.
• Healthy Hawks — KU Med’s pediatric obesity program that works with families and children ages two through 18. The three-stage program run by Dr. Ann Davis helps children reduce weight through regular clinical and group meetings.
Davis said that by combining the programs researchers would be able to work more efficiently together and get more out of each program’s data.
“This is primarily a research endeavor, so by combining data from the three programs we can learn new and different things,” Davis said. “For example, one of our graduate students is specifically targeting the Latino population. Now she can assess and study a lot of co-various factors that she couldn’t assess within just one of the programs. It gives us a much wider pool to draw from.”
Davis said the new center would soon double its staff size. Officials are recruiting an endowed chair in Pediatric Nutrition Research at Children’s Mercy and an assistant professor and associate professor at KU Med.
The new center is currently funded by endowment grants from the Baum Foundation, the Sosland Foundation and the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation.