Five years ago, the Tufts Nutrition Collaborative - Center for Drug Abuse and AIDS Research (TNC-CDAAR)was funded by NIDA as just one of two CDAAR's in the nation. The CDAARs were charged with thefollowing mission: to foster a collaborative approach to drug abuse and addiction research; to enable studiesthat would not occur without the climate, facilities, and resources that a research center can uniquelyprovide; to serve as a resource to attract established and promising investigators into drug abuse research;and to provide opportunities for research training, career development, and mentoring. The TNC-CDAARwas formed as a partnership between three East Coast Institutions (Tufts, Brown and Johns Hopkins) with aspecific focus on studying nutritional and metabolic disorders among HIV-positive and HIV-negative drugusers. Over the past five years, we have expanded the TNC-CDAAR to include collaborators from 3international sites: Argentina, India, and Vietnam. Our major accomplishments, thus far, have been to 1)design and implement several new studies to assess and compare the prevalence and incidence of specificnutritional and metabolic disorders in drug users of different ethnicities, both in the U.S. and abroad; 2)develop training materials, protocols, and manuals for investigators who want to undertake similar studies intheir localities; 3) help in the development of new grant proposals in Center-related areas of research; and 4)become a resource center on nutrition and metabolic disorders in drug users. Specifically, he Epidemiologyand Biostatistics Core (Core F) will provide a wide range of services to Center Members to facilitate thedesign, collection, and analysis of nutritional and metabolic complications of HIV infection, recreational druguse, Hepatitis and liver disease among studies of injection drug users (IDUs) from the collaboratinginstitutions. The major role of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Core will be to increase the efficiency ofdata collection and analysis for Center Members at the collaborating institutions and to institute qualityassurance procedures for all centralized data collected (See Section III below for listing of specific Coreservices). The Core will benefit from the expertise of two epidemiologists (Drs. Tang and Forrester) and astatistician (Dr. Terrin), all from Tufts University. Our team has worked together for several years on multiplecross-sectional and longitudinal datasets of drug users from Baltimore, Boston, and Providence. Dr. Terrinhas developed models for longitudinal cohort studies to accommodate the inconsistent nature of drug use,allowing for the examination of use and duration of use for specific types of drugs on outcomes of interest.
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