? Julio C. Vijil, Jr., MD, MPH is applying for the NIDDK Mentored Clinical Scientist Award to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (K08). Dr. Vijil is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) College of Medicine, where he is full-time faculty. He has exciting potential as a clinical researcher, and his specific interest in quality of life in Hispanic patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) is very appropriate to the mission of the NIDDK. At UIC, he will have a multitude of resources for his scholarly growth, including a faculty that is very active in research. With the assistance of Drs. James Lash, Ben Gerber, and Everett Smith, Dr. Vijil will undertake a rigorous career development training program to help him reach his goal of becoming an independent researcher. This will include a research plan that deals with the issue of health-related quality of life in Hispanic patients with CKD. Dr. Vijil will perform a validation of a Spanish version of the Kidney Disease Quality of Life Short Form-36 Instrument. He will also evaluate cross-form equivalence between the Spanish and English versions, as well as measure associations of the instrument score with subject characteristics. Dr. Vijil's short term goal is to complete this work under the mentored research training award, with a structure designed to ensure his independence. In the long-term, Dr. Vijil's goal is to continue research on quality of life and CKD, focusing on Hispanics. Depending on the results of this validation, Dr. Vijil is interested in refining and improving this, and possibly other, quality of life instruments, along with studying outcomes associated with quality of life measures. ? Relevance ? Kidney disease has become major public health problem in the United States, and quality of life has been shown to be lower in individuals who suffer from kidney disease. There are very few studies about quality of life in Hispanics with kidney disease, partly because the survey used to measure it was translated into English only a few years ago. This study plan to validate the Spanish version of the survey and to evaluate whether the English and Spanish versions have similar meaning. ? ?
| Porter, Anna C; Vijil Jr, Julio C; Unruh, Mark et al. (2010) Health-related quality of life in Hispanics with chronic kidney disease. Transl Res 155:157-63 |
