We propose to continue and expand a successful series of interdisciplinary collaborations currently funded as the P-50 Michigan Interdisciplinary Center on Social Inequalities, Mind, and Body. Consistent with the change from a P50 to an R24 Center, the MICSIMB will emphasize support cores for funded research projects, research enhancements to these projects, and exploratory/pilot studies. The R-24 MICSIMB will support the expansion of an innovative interdisciplinary research program seeking to understand the relationships of psychosocial factors related to health (beliefs, attitudes, affective states, values, stress and social relationships), their broader social, community, and psychological antecedents, and the pathophysiologic pathways through which psychosocial factors and their antecedents contribute to the development of physical and mental disorders. The research will encompass human development over the full life course from infancy and childhood through adulthood and older age, consider a broad range of physical and mental health outcomes, with some emphasis on aging, human development, and cardiovascular disease, and have important foci on health disparities, life course approaches, spatial analysis/neighborhood effects, gene-environment interaction, and methodological innovation. The research enhancements will make use of a large set of ongoing activities and archived data available at the University of Michigan, representing information on diverse, representative study populations of over 200,000 people. The activities cover a range of topics from analysis of the role of neighborhood and community factors and psychosocial factors in health, to interactions between genes and the socioeconomic and psychosocial environment in hypertension and dementia. Such an approach will build on the previous efforts of a large number of studies and represents a very cost-effective approach to addressing critical issues in the expanded program of mind-body research that we have been carrying on so successfully. Participating will be a very accomplished interdisciplinary group of 22 core investigators, spanning 16 units across the University who have published over 1,000 scientific papers that have been cited more than 22,000 times with at least 85% of these papers relevant to the proposed Center expansion.
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