This is the first accurate estimate of the frequency of the proteins, called autoantibodies, the researchers say. The findings appear online and in an upcoming print edition of the journal Arthritis and Rheumatism.

“This study is a baseline that can help physicians understand, when they identify autoantibodies, how often these proteins indicate disease,” said lead author Edward Chan, a professor of oral biology in the UF College of Dentistry.

The body produces proteins called antibodies to fight against infections, but in some cases, these proteins become turncoats, attacking the body’s own tissues instead. The most common autoantibodies, called antinuclear antibodies, are frequently used as a marker for autoimmune diseases. Although antinuclear antibodies are common, their presence does not always indicate disease.

Chan, and co-lead author Dr. Minoru Satoh, an associate professor of rheumatology and clinical immunology in the UF College of Medicine, along with national colleagues, studied five years’ worth of data from almost 5,000 people, collected through the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey. The survey amasses a host of health information from adults and children around the country using questionnaires, blood tests and other medical examinations.

No previous researchers have used such a large sample, representative of the general population, to study how frequently autoantibodies occur, Chan said.

The researchers looked for the rogue antibodies in blood serum using an advanced microscope technique that uses a fluorescent dye to selectively light up antinuclear antibodies.

They found that nearly 14 percent of the study population had antinuclear antibodies. The antibodies were more common in African-Americans, women and older adults. The frequency of antinuclear antibodies tends to increase with age then level off over time. And women were more likely to develop antinuclear antibodies as they age.

Unexpectedly, autoantibodies were less common in overweight and obese individuals than in people of normal weight.

“Being obese is often considered a factor contributing to many autoimmune diseases,” Chan said. “So we expected that overweight people might have more autoantibodies. But that is not what we observed.”

Judy Van De Water, a professor of rheumatology and clinical immunology at the University of California, Davis, who was not part of the study, was intrigued that autoantibodies were less common in overweight individuals. She chalks it up to the appetite-reducing hormone leptin — which is produced in fatty tissue and acts as a marker of inflammation. Leptin is often low in people who are obese but high in people who have antibodies that attack the body’s own tissues.

Future studies might look at how exposure to chemicals and other substances in the environment affects the levels of antinuclear antibodies in the immune system, as well as how those levels change over time.

“This is an important study that will serve as the basis for future research on the causes of these antibodies and related diseases,” said the study’s senior author Dr. Fred Miller, acting clinical director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Services, which funded the study. “It’s a first step in the process.”

MDS occurs when the body’s blood factory does not produce healthy red or white blood cells or platelets. Getting a more accurate picture of the disease could lead to earlier diagnosis for patients and better guidance for public health policy. The findings, reported in the November issue of the journal Leukemia Research and in an earlier issue of the journal Blood, indicate that more women than men are overlooked.

“The data from the cancer registry is showing us a partial picture of MDS,” said Dr. Christopher R. Cogle, an associate professor of hematology and oncology in the UF College of Medicine’s department of medicine. “State cancer registries, which feed the national registries, need more resources so they can more comprehensively capture this disease and others, such as skin and gastrointestinal cancers.”

MDS is a hard-to-diagnose disease that presents itself in a wide range of ways. On the less severe end of the spectrum, it shows up as a low blood cell count, and, at the other extreme, as leukemic growths inside the bone marrow.

Seventy percent of people with MDS die of complications related to a low blood cell count. Even with low-grade disease, the average person’s survival after diagnosis is about five years.

“For those diagnosed in their 60s, we know we can do better than that,” said Cogle, a member of the UF Shands Cancer Center whose clinical and research program has been designated a Center of Excellence by the MDS Foundation. “At best, we can double survival time — but we have to know who the patients are so we can offer them the right treatment.”

Cogle and colleagues at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa noticed that their clinical practices received many referrals from local physicians trying to figure out the cause of low blood cell counts. MDS diagnoses in those cases occurred almost exclusively on an outpatient basis. But such cases are not captured by registries, which get most of their data from hospitals and laboratories.

“There was a discord between where we saw the disease and where the registry data came from,” Cogle said. “There was a mismatch between clinical practice and the data, so we tackled that discrepancy and tried to make sense of it.”

The researchers devised a new algorithm that made an allowance for the difficulty in diagnosing the disease. Previous studies used MDS insurance claims to estimate the number of cases. But that approach is error-prone because MDS is often coded as different diseases, such as leukemia, aplastic anemia or even vitamin deficiencies, before the true diagnosis becomes clear.

In the new calculation, the researchers counted only patients who had had at least two MDS insurance claims at least 30 days apart. They also included blood count and bone marrow biopsy confirmation in the one-year period before MDS insurance claims. They excluded people who were making a Medicare claim for the first time, because those people might have been diagnosed previously, while covered by private insurance.

The UF and Moffitt researchers found that in the 65-and-older age group there were 75 new cases per 100,000 people each year — almost four times the accepted estimate of 20 per 100,000 that is based on the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results cancer registry. That registry shows an overall estimate for all age groups of 3.3 new MDS cases in every 100,000 persons each year.

So who are the people being left out of the traditional database? It turns out that more women than men were omitted, and those people generally had a lower grade of disease and lower medical expenses. Cancer registries indicate that the average age of diagnosis is 71 to 76, but the researchers will use their new calculations to find out whether people are getting diagnosed at a younger age.

The researchers say the MDS underestimate prevents people with the disease from getting available care. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for example, uses the low estimate of the number of people affected by the disease as part of the rationale for not paying for bone marrow transplants in MDS patients, except in approved clinical trial settings.

The low estimates also hamper research efforts that could lead to new treatments.

“These data bring the realization that the incidence of MDS is much greater than previously recognized, and that emphasizes the need for greater research funding for the disease,” said senior author Dr. Alan F. List, executive vice president and physician-in-chief at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute.

A better estimate of MDS cases could also help to galvanize funding agencies to invest more resources into patient education about the disease and about treatments.

“They can let the public know about the significance of a low blood count — not to sit on it, but to go out and get a diagnosis,” Cogle said. “If you have MDS, we have ways to help you.”

“Alcohol consumption can be harmful in persons with HIV infection if it affects the ability to take medications on schedule, causes people to make poor decisions, or has direct harmful effects on the immune system or other parts of the body,” said the study’s lead investigator Dr. Robert Cook, an associate professor of epidemiology and medicine at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions and the `. “It is the same with any chronic disease, such as diabetes. Our goals are to identify simple and acceptable treatment options that can help reduce these harmful effects.”

More than 290,000 women in the United States are living with HIV/AIDS, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Florida ranks second among U.S. states for the number of women with the disease. Miami and Jacksonville are among the nation’s urban areas most affected by HIV/AIDS, along with Baton Rouge, La., New York City and Washington, D.C.

“Florida is unique in terms of its racial and ethnic diversity, which will allow us to better understand ongoing health disparities related to HIV,” said Cook, who is also affiliated with the UF division of general internal medicine and the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute.

In an earlier long-term study of alcohol consumption in women with HIV, Cook and colleagues found that 14 to 24 percent of the women reported hazardous drinking in the past year. Hazardous alcohol consumption is defined as having four or more drinks daily or seven or more drinks in a week. Previous studies have shown elevated risk for adverse health effects in people with HIV who consume hazardous amounts of alcohol, including higher levels of HIV virus, lower medication adherence, increased risky sexual behavior and more rapid disease progression.

UF researchers, with colleagues from Florida International University and the University of Miami, will study whether the prescription medication naltrexone can reduce hazardous drinking in women with HIV and improve their health outcomes. Naltrexone has been found to decrease alcohol use in previous studies of men with severe drinking problems, but has not been tested exclusively in women or in people with HIV infection, Cook said. Researchers also will assess important clinical measures, such as adherence to HIV medications, white blood cell counts, levels of HIV virus present in the body and risky sexual behavior.

The study is one of three involving Florida universities to examine alcohol consumption in women with HIV. Cook serves as director of this Florida consortium, which brings together a team of investigators from UF, Florida International University and the University of Miami, as well as Rush University in Chicago. Together, the three studies total $5 million in funding from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

“Florida is a key state for the National AIDS Strategy,” said Kendall J. Bryant, director of alcohol and HIV/AIDS research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “We must understand the dynamics of the many cultures that live there to effectively address the role of alcohol use and the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS. Translating what we already know about alcohol misuse and about HIV prevention and treatment will take a talented team of scientists and practitioners working together in Florida.”

Dr. Maria Jose Miguez, a professor in the School of Integrated Science and Humanity at Florida International University, will serve as the South Florida site principal investigator and will lead a study of possible connections between alcohol consumption, cholesterol and serious long-term outcomes in women with HIV infection. In the third study, Seema Desai, an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at Rush University, will focus on the direct effects of alcohol consumption on the immune system over time. Participants in the new studies will be recruited primarily from the Miami and Fort Lauderdale areas.

“This research partnership shows the power of Florida universities when they work together and represents an important public health collaboration to benefit our state and local communities,” said Linda B. Cottler, chair of the UF department of epidemiology. “This work will also provide valuable opportunities for our students to learn research design and methods.”

Other UF team members on the study include Babette Brumback, an associate professor in the department of biostatistics, and Jeffrey Harman, an associate professor in the department of health services research, management and policy. Co-investigators from the University of Miami include Dr. Luis Espinoza, an associate professor of clinical medicine, and John Lewis, a research assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

The finding could help medical professionals understand the origin of behavior and disease, which may be useful for customizing treatments or assessing risks in context with specific medical conditions.

Writing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, developmental biologists Martin Cohn and Zhengui Zheng of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the department of molecular genetics and microbiology at the UF College of Medicine, show that male and female digit proportions are determined by the balance of sex hormones during early embryonic development. Differences in how these hormones activate receptors in males and females affect the growth of specific digits.

The discovery provides a genetic explanation for a raft of studies that link finger proportions with traits ranging from sperm counts, aggression, musical ability, sexual orientation and sports prowess, to health problems such as autism, depression, heart attack and breast cancer.

It has long been suspected that the digit ratio is influenced by sex hormones, but until now direct experimental evidence was lacking.

“The discovery that growth of the developing digits is controlled directly by androgen and estrogen receptor activity confirms that finger proportions are a lifelong signature of our early hormonal milieu,” Cohn said. “In addition to understanding the basis of one of the more bizarre differences between the sexes, it’s exciting to think that our fingers can tell us something about the signals that we were exposed to during a short period of our time in the womb. There is growing evidence that a number of adult diseases have fetal origins. With the new data, we’ve shown that that the digit ratio reflects one’s prenatal androgen and estrogen activity, and that could have some explanatory power.”

Cohn and Zheng, also members of the UF Genetics Institute, found that the developing digits of male and female mouse embryos are packed with receptors for sex hormones. By following the prenatal development of the limb buds of mice, which have a digit length ratio similar to humans, the scientists controlled the gene signaling effects of androgen — also known as testosterone — and estrogen.

Essentially, more androgen equated to a proportionally longer fourth digit. More estrogen resulted in a feminized appearance. The study uncovered how these hormonal signals govern the rate at which skeletal precursor cells divide, and showed that different finger bones have different levels of sensitivity to androgen and estrogen.

Since Roman times, people have associated the hand’s fourth digit with the wearing of rings. In many cultures, a proportionally longer ring finger in men has been taken as a sign of fertility.

“I’ve been struggling to understand this trait since 1998,” said John T. Manning, a professor at Swansea University in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the current research. “When I read this study, I thought, thank goodness, we’ve attracted the attention of a developmental biologist with all the sophisticated techniques of molecular genetics and biology.”

In dozens of papers and two books, including the seminal “Digit Ratio” in 2002, Manning has studied the meaning of the relative lengths of second and fourth digits in humans, known to scientists as the 2D:4D ratio.

“When Zheng and Cohn blocked testosterone receptors, they got a female digit ratio,” Manning said. “When they added testosterone they got super male ratios, and when they added estrogen, super female ratios. And they’ve provided us with a list of 19 genes that are sensitive to prenatal testosterone and prenatal estrogen.

“I find this completely convincing and very useful,” Manning said. “We can now be more focused in our examination of the links between digit ratio and sex-dependent behaviors, diseases of the immune system, cardiovascular disorders and a number of cancers.”

Cohn, whose uses the tools of genetics, genomics and molecular biology to study limb development, said his lab began studying the digit ratios after Zheng became determined to find an explanation.

“He suggested that the 2D:4D ratio would be an interesting question, and I have to admit to being skeptical,” Cohn said. “When he came back with the initial results, I was blown away. We looked at each others hands, then got busy planning the next experiment.”

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute supported this research.

The discovery marks the first effective therapy scientists have ever found for the lung disease known as lymphangioleiomyomatosis, or LAM, a rare condition in women often discovered during pregnancy, said Dr. Mark Brantly, a University of Florida professor of medicine and one of the co-authors of the paper.

“Like many lung diseases, this was a disease of unknown cause. We really had no therapy. We used to manipulate hormones, and it really just made the women sick. It was really sad. I used to watch these women, on a regular basis, die over time, with nothing to really offer them,” said Brantly, who also serves as chief of the division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine in the UF College of Medicine. “Now we have a therapy that not only stops the progress of the disease but improves lung function over time.”

Known as the MILES Trial, the clinical trial was led by the University of Cincinnati and took place at sites across the United States as well as in Canada and Japan. UF was the trial site for Florida. The National Institutes of Health and other agencies funded the study.

According to the study’s findings, patients who received the drug rapamycin, also known as sirolimus, for one year performed significantly better on lung function tests than those who received the placebo. During the second year of the trial, the researchers stopped administering the therapy and observed patients.

The patients’ conditions worsened when they stopped receiving the drug, likely meaning those who receive this therapy will need to continue taking it over time.

“It is a potent drug, but we do not use it in concentrations high enough to cause significant problems,” Brantly said. “It seems to be very effective.”

LAM is similar to a slow-growing cancer, Brantly says. But that is something scientists have only begun to understand in the past decade, when they began unraveling the molecular complexities of the disease — complexities that are still not fully understood.

In patients with the disease, mutations spur tumor-suppressing signals in the body to switch off, causing a burst of cell growth as smooth muscle cells invade the lungs. These cells can choke off airways and cause cysts to form. Because of this cell growth, patients with LAM also are prone to developing abdominal tumors, Brantly said.

Studies on LAM cells pinpointed a cell-signaling pathway, which if blocked, could throw the switch back, putting an end to the cell population explosion. Because rapamycin blocks that pathway, the scientists began to test it, first in a small number of women and then in the clinical trial.

Because so few women have this disease — there are only 2,000 patients known worldwide, according to the LAM Foundation — researchers banded together to complete the trial.

“Our founder started this foundation 16 years ago when her daughter was diagnosed with LAM,” said Jill Raleigh, executive director of the LAM Foundation, which helped fund the trial and recruit patients. “She found one article about LAM. To be able to say there is a treatment now is unbelievable.”

Though not all LAM patients respond to the treatment, the discovery marks a giant milestone in helping patients with the disease, Brantly said.

“We want to help patients understand, this is one treatment,” Raleigh said. “We are still not there yet. We still have a long way to go, but there is hope now. Before (March 16) all we could say is ‘There’s no treatment.’ Now at least there is that feeling of hope, a treatment and more on the horizon.”

Published Monday (March 7) in the journal Pediatrics, the study examines a decade of cases of abusive head trauma from a New York health system. Of the 34 cases reported, six of the children died, says Dr. Debra Esernio-Jenssen, medical director of the UF Child Protection Team.

“Through the years, I had noticed we had a lot of female perpetrators, so I decided to see if there were any differences, and there were,” said Esernio-Jenssen, a child abuse pediatrician who conducted her research while medical director of a child protection consultation team at a New York children’s hospital. “Victims of males had more significant injuries — all six deaths were from male perpetrators. Another big difference is that males tended to confess and females didn’t.”

Although past studies have traditionally linked more cases of abusive head trauma to men, half of the patients in Esernio-Jenssen’s study were abused by women.

“Mothers for centuries, probably, have been picking up and shaking infants,” she said. “Although males are often more represented (in criminal cases), when you take anonymous phone calls, mothers say they shake their kids to get them to stop crying. If you do shake a baby hard enough, they do go to sleep; they become unconscious.”

Although some parents might worry that a child may experience abusive head trauma after being playfully tossed in the air or falling from a bed, the force needed to generate these injuries is significantly more violent, Esernio-Jenssen says.

The head trauma inflicted when a baby is violently shaken or suffers a severe blow is actually similar to what would happen if a child were riding in a car that rolled over or was in a major collision. Injuries can include bleeding and swelling in the brain and retinal hemorrhages. Abusive head trauma can also cause the heart or breathing to stop and can put a child in a coma. Lasting neurological damage can occur, if the child survives.

“This is not playing, bouncing the baby on your knee or even tossing him up in the air. This is violent, severe shaking,” she said.

The children in the study ranged from 1 month old to almost 3 years of age. Almost all the children had bleeding in their brain and retinal hemorrhages. They were more likely to suffer from cardiopulmonary arrest, require care from neurosurgeons and have a worse outcome if their abusers were male.

Women were least likely to confess — only three of 17 did, compared with 15 of 17 men who confessed — and least likely to be prosecuted. The women were also older on average than the men. The median age of female perpetrators was 34, seven years older than the median age of men.

During their confessions, 18 perpetrators admitted specifically to shaking the children, linking the victims’ abusive head trauma to shaking and not a blow to the head or other injury, Esernio-Jenssen said.

“This adds to the literature,” she said. “People do confess to shaking, alone. And kids do die from shaking.”

However, with the start of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week today, a University of Florida researcher points to a study showing that African-American women are less susceptible to media-driven body dissatisfaction.

While previous studies have shown the negative influence of thinner-than-average models on body image, the UF study by exercise psychologist Heather Hausenblas shows that race can have a moderating effect.

“We’re bombarded with media images of what’s considered ideal. We wanted to measure the influence of race on how that makes women feel about their bodies,” said Hausenblas, who co-authored the research with doctoral student Ninoska DeBraganza. “We know that African-American women report less body dissatisfaction overall than Caucasian women, who are the most affected of all ethnicities. But to my knowledge, no study on media influence had ever taken the ethnicity of the models into account.”

In the study, published in the March 2010 issue of the Journal of Black Studies, Hausenblas showed two sets of photographs to 31 Caucasian and 30 African-American undergraduate students.

Both sets of slides showed images of white female models from magazines and catalogs. One set represented the slender “media ideal,” while the other models’ figures were more representative of average build. After viewing the “ideal” slides, white women reported more body dissatisfaction than they had felt before viewing them. After white women viewed the “average” models, however, they felt better about their bodies. African-American women, in contrast, reported no change in their body satisfaction after viewing either set of slides.

The study used Caucasian models to reflect the majority of images in magazines and catalogs. The resulting impact on the white women’s body dissatisfaction may suggest that they were more inclined to compare themselves to the models than the African-American women were, Hausenblas said.

Kevin Thompson, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida, said the study poses some intriguing questions.

“This innovative investigation suggests that one reason that African-American women have lower rates of body dissatisfaction is that they don’t compare themselves to Caucasian models or use them as a reference point for determining how they feel about their appearance,” he said. “If comparisons with same-ethnicity models are provided, African-American women might be affected in the same manner as Caucasian women. Or, if they continue to be unaffected, then it would be even more fascinating, suggesting a general strategy among African-American women of resisting the negative influences of unrealistic images of attractiveness as perpetuated by the media.”

Hausenblas would also like to study images portrayed in music videos, movies and television shows.

“What’s important is to find out the driving force behind body dissatisfaction. We don’t want to take a cookie-cutter approach and assume that media images affect all races equally.”

Body dissatisfaction is the leading precursor to eating disorders, and understanding the factors that drive it could help in targeting effective treatments, Hausenblas said.

“We’re hoping to make people more aware that media images can have a negative effect, and not just generalize about it,” she said. “If we don’t know the effects of ethnicity, interventions for body dissatisfaction might not work.”

These surgeries carry greater health risks and are more expensive than a less invasive, equally effective procedure called a needle biopsy.

“Open surgical biopsy is not accounting for 10 percent or 5 percent of initial breast biopsies, which is what’s recommended,” said Dr. Luke Gutwein, a surgical resident in UF’s department of surgery. “It’s accounting for 30 percent of initial breast biopsies, so open biopsy is incredibly over-utilized.”

Gutwein and six other UF researchers analyzed state public health data for the years 2003 to 2008 and found that about 30 percent of breast biopsies were performed through open surgery. The study reflects conditions outside Florida, too, said Dr. David P. Winchester, a professor of surgery at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Ill., and a former chairman of the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers.

“This is an important message and should be generalizable to other parts of the country, in terms of the desirability of using minimally invasive biopsy techniques,” he said.

Needle biopsies are usually more appropriate when the suspicious area can be seen clearly through imaging techniques, according to reports written by panels of breast health specialists. The procedure, typically performed by radiologists, requires inserting a needle through a tiny incision into the suspicious area and extracting tissue samples through the needle. The radiologist monitors the procedure via ultrasound or mammography as it takes place.

A needle biopsy leaves only a tiny dot of a scar and carries significantly less risk of infection than an open surgical biopsy. In addition, it is less painful and does not require any recovery time. Most breast biopsies show the area in question to be benign.

The latest report, published in the Journal of the American College of Surgery in 2009, stated that open breast biopsies, which require a full surgical procedure and general anesthesia, should be used to initially diagnose a lesion in less than 5 percent to 10 percent of cases.

Though use of needle biopsies increased significantly during the five years studied, the researchers found that overuse of open breast biopsies in Florida leads to $37.2 million in charges each year. The study did not take providers’ charges into account, meaning the actual amount wasted is much greater. The researchers did not analyze possible reasons for over-utilization of open breast biopsies.

“The article has clearly defined the problems with doing an open biopsy,” Winchester said. “The most compelling reason is that this may be a benign lesion. If it’s benign and needle biopsy confirms that, then surgery isn’t necessary.”

Some patients, such as those with very small breasts or whose lesions are located close to the chest wall or an implant, are not candidates for a needle biopsy.

In cases where a needle biopsy reveals cancer, physicians can begin treatment before surgery and can plan better for removal of the cancer, increasing the likelihood of extracting it entirely in a single surgery.

But Dr. Stephen Grobmyer, an associate professor of surgery, a member of the UF Shands Cancer Center and medical director of the UF Breast Center, said he regularly sees patients who have undergone an open breast biopsy when a needle biopsy would have sufficed. He said this can make multidisciplinary therapy and additional surgeries more difficult to plan and administer.

“It makes determining how big a lesion is, or if there’s any residual cancer, difficult,” Grobmyer said. “It often makes the surgery that is required more extensive. It often will mean that patients, where they could have had one operation, end up with more than one operation.”

Other researchers involved in the project include UF’s Dr. Darwin Ang, an assistant professor of acute care surgery; Huazhi Liu, a statistical coordinator in the department of surgery; Dr. Julia Marshall, a clinical assistant professor in the department of radiology; Dr. Steven Hochwald, an associate professor and chief of surgical oncology; and Dr. Edward Copeland III, a distinguished professor of surgery.

Grobmyer said educating health-care providers and patients alike about the issue should be a higher priority.

“We spend a lot of time talking about a lot of other things,” he said. “This is a major area in breast cancer care which is cost-inefficient. It’s bad for patients. It’s just bad for the whole system.”

“We have some sweet potato pie here, macaroni and cheese there and some collard greens and some dressing back here,” Trollyn Gillins said to the group.

“So we have to get all of that off,” she added, pointing to her stomach, back and sides.

For an hour, Gillins, 49, led the group through a series of jumping jacks, leg lifts, crunches and other moves she had learned from another church member at Open Door Ministries.

In the year since she started going to church to exercise, Gillins has been able to stop taking one of her two blood pressure medicines, on the recommendation of her doctor. Before, she used to get exhausted easily, but now she can walk 3 miles with ease and line dance for more than an hour.

Now, thanks to a $600,000 grant to the University of Florida and Florida A&M University, more people like Gillins will gain skills and knowledge that can help them take charge of their health.

The award, from the State University System Board of Governors, funded the launch of the Community Health Workers Training and Research Institute, which seeks to help people improve their health while acquiring marketable skills that can be translated into job opportunities within the health care field.

The institute will train people to become community health workers who can educate themselves and others about healthful behaviors. That will increase the supply of health workers and boost the chances for unemployed, underemployed or disabled persons to find work, particularly in rural, medically underserved areas with high proportions of ethnic minorities.

“Not only will the institute help Florida address its obesity and other health-related problems,” said co-principal investigator Carolyn Tucker, a professor of psychology and community health and family medicine, “it will also help address the state’s unemployment situation.”

Folakemi Odedina, a professor in the College of Pharmacy and outreach director for the College of Medicine’s Prostate Disease Center, and Cynthia Harris, a professor at Florida A&M, are the other principal investigators in the study. Alma Dixon leads the efforts at Bethune-Cookman University, one of the research partners.

“This grant is the fruit of more than 10 years of research partnership between UF and Florida A&M,” said UF College of Pharmacy Dean William Riffee. “We are proud that our college is a part of this effort to end health care disparities in our state.”

Training at the institute will center on a health education approach that Tucker, director of the UF Health Disparities Research and Intervention Program, developed and has implemented across the country. Called the Health-Smart Behavior Program, it promotes increased consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and water; reduced intake of fatty, sugary and salty foods and sugary beverages; and increased physical activity.

Institute leaders aim to develop a credentialing program for community health workers that is recognized statewide and used as a national model. Graduates will get assistance finding jobs within local health systems and service organizations.

“The institute will empower individuals to improve their health, their communities, and, in turn, the state of Florida,” said Dr. Michael Good, dean of the UF College of Medicine. “This is a fine example of how strong collaborations between researchers and communities can give people the tools they need to change their lives for the better.”

Initially, the institute, which also has the support of College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean Paul D’Anieri, will train at least 360 health workers in Alachua, Gadsden and Volusia counties over eight months. People like Betty James, 63, whose cholesterol levels and overall health and fitness have improved since she became a “health empowerment coach” at Open Door Ministries.

“Sometimes if you know the person who’s giving you information, you’re more relaxed and more receptive to what they’re telling you,” she said.

Despite the documented mental and physical benefits of exercise, health care practitioners have long assumed that people with eating disorders shouldn’t be encouraged to burn calories through physical activity. While it’s true that compulsive exercisers risk further harm, healthy exercise that’s not compulsive could help people with eating disorders or people who are at risk for eating disorders, said Heather Hausenblas, a UF exercise psychologist who co-authored the study, published in the January issue of European Eating Disorders Review.

“When it comes to eating disorders, exercise has always been seen as a negative because people use it as a way to control their weight. But for most people, exercise is a very positive thing,” Hausenblas said. “Our results show it’s not necessarily bad for people with disordered eating to engage in exercise. The effects on self-esteem, depression, mood and body image can reduce the risk of eating pathologies.”

In the study, co-authored by Brian Cook, an exercise psychologist at the University of Kentucky, Peter Giacobbi, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, and former UF doctoral student Daniel Tuccitto, Hausenblas and her colleagues surveyed 539 normal-weight students, most of whom were not at risk for eating disorders. They evaluated the students’ drive to be thin, along with their exercise habits and risk for exercise dependence, and used statistical models to find potential relationships. She found that, more than its physical benefits, the psychological effects of exercise could help prevent and treat eating disorders.

The study’s findings could have far-reaching impact, said Danielle Symons Downs, director of the Exercise Psychology Laboratory at The Pennsylvania State University.

“The public health implications of this study are important,” she said. “This research is important for understanding the complex interactions between exercise behavior and eating pathology, and it can assist clinicians with better understanding how to intervene with and treat eating pathology.”

Beyond offering an affordable treatment to address the needs of people with eating disorders, exercise therapies also could help relieve the burden of such diseases on the health-care system, Hausenblas said. “If a patient is extremely underweight, you’re not going to have them exercising two or three hours a day. But once they’re at a stable level, exercise could have a big positive effect,” she said. Hausenblas hopes to launch another study that would follow at-risk individuals over a period of several months to see if exercise impacts their symptoms.

“We’d like to assess them over time, and we hope to see their risk factors go down,” she said.

Polygamy, bisexuality, homosexuality, philandering men and working women have been accepted in many societies throughout recorded history, said John Scanzoni, a UF sociology professor and author of “Healthy American Families: A Progressive Alternative to the Religious Right,” published earlier this year by Praeger.

“Ever since humans have been around, we’ve been continually altering, tinkering, tweaking, reinventing and changing every aspect of our families,” he said.

One example of a failure to understand how family life has evolved to meet people’s needs is the argument that homosexual marriage is wrong because it violates the ancient moral ideal that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, he said.

“Throughout history in most parts of the world, people believed that the right and moral thing to do was for one man to have several wives,” he said.

The vast majority of the world’s populations practiced some form of polygamy, which was invented by men primarily for their own economic and social benefit, Scanzoni said. A man wanted to be assured that his land and livestock would be passed onto his sons after he died, and having multiple wives increased his chances of having male heirs, he said.

“Insights into polygamous marriage – including male promiscuity – can be gotten by reading the stories of revered Bible characters such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and David,” he said.

The Greeks and Romans began to move away from polygamy for practical reasons, but men still had sex before and after marriage with as many women as they wished, Scanzoni said. Furthermore, many Greco-Roman men were bisexual, and many Greek thinkers believed the most profound love occurred between two men, not between a man and woman, he said.

“Plato, for instance, believed sex with one’s wife was necessary in order to bear children for the sake of family honor, but for sexual ecstasy one turned to one’s male lover,” he said.

Along with accepting alternate forms of sexuality, people have long been receptive to the idea of women in the labor force, Scanzoni said. Prior to the early 19th century Industrial Revolution, women typically worked alongside their husbands on farms and many also carried on vital occupations such as seamstress and midwife, he said.

“There was no sense at all in people’s minds that women should not do productive labor; the woman’s labor was as essential as the man’s for the survival of the household,” he said. “Women did not grow up thinking a man would support them, unless they belonged to that tiny handful of elite upper-class women who were aristocrats or royalty.”

During the Industrial Revolution, women, men and their children left their farms to work in factories, but many men eventually moved to the board room to become the core of the emerging middle class while women were excluded from these economic opportunities and encouraged to stay home, he said.

“For the first time in history a new style of marriage was born, in which the husband was provider and the wife was homemaker, and it permeated late 19th and 20th century America, becoming the 1950s style of marriage championed by the Religious Right,” he said.

Today, however, there has been a shift away from that option as increasing numbers of younger, well-educated women view work just as men do, as essential for gaining a sense of autonomy or control over one’s life, he said.

A second reason for the change is that during the current economic crisis men have been more likely than women to lose their jobs, Scanzoni said. The downturn has highlighted how essential women’s earnings are to the economic well-being of the household; underscoring that just as men don’t have the option not to work, neither do women, he said.

“The male as primary breadwinner used to be practical when men earned more than women,” he said. “But as women start to earn more or even the same money as men, that male breadwinner role no longer makes any economic sense.”

Recent census data show that in large urban centers, and for the first time ever, child-free women in their 20s earn more than young men, he said.

The findings could ultimately help shorten the national liver transplant waiting list by allowing the use of livers donated by older adults.

“If we can improve the function and health of livers, and increase donations from seniors, then we can significantly improve the success rate of transplantations,” said Jae-Sung Kim, an assistant professor of surgery in the UF College of Medicine, and a member of the UF Institute on Aging, who led the research team.

Kim presented the findings Sunday during the American Association for the Studies of Liver Diseases, in Boston.

The liver performs many vital and complex jobs, including turning food into usable nutrients and removing toxins from the body. But just as the brain and muscles lose function as people age, the liver also becomes less resilient. Because of that, liver surgery in elderly patients is often unsuccessful, and livers donated by older adults are frequently unusable because of increased risk of failure or poor function. Recipients who do get livers from old donors often need a new transplant within a year.

Surgery to remove portions of the liver or transplant the entire organ involves the clamping off of blood vessels, temporarily depriving the organ of blood flow and oxygen. Suddenly restoring blood and oxygen after surgery causes stress-related damage known as ischemia/reperfusion injury. Older livers have great difficulty recovering from the injury, whereas younger livers rebound readily.

Existing treatments have not made a substantial difference in how patients fare after transplantation, partly because liver injury mechanisms are not well-understood.

UF researchers were interested in a process by which the body removes damaged cellular components, and which has a potential role in aging.

In particular, they looked at the clearing away of damaged mitochondria, the energy centers of cells. That helps cells optimize performance in a number of ways, including preventing the formation of toxic chemicals, maintaining appropriate levels of energy production and recycling nutrients.

In laboratory studies, Kim and colleagues found that disruption of this cellular cleanup is linked to the inability of aged livers to recover from surgery-related stress. They discovered an age-related decrease in levels of one of the main proteins, called Atg4B, that orchestrates the process.

“This work, for the first time, gets into the mechanism of why livers from older animals are more prone to injury from ischemia/reperfusion than those from young animals,” said Dr. John Lemasters, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and of pharmaceutical sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina who was not involved in the study.

The researchers used gene therapy to replenish the depleted protein and observed liver function afterward in liver transplant mouse models whose ages correspond to those of people in their late 20s to early 30s, and in their 80s.

The approach reduced mitochondrial dysfunction and promoted recovery after ischemia/reperfusion injury, boosting the performance of livers from old animals beyond that of normal middle-aged animals. In untreated aged livers, mitochondrial levels were at nearly zero after injury, whereas 80 percent of the mitochondria in treated livers were functional. Cells in the treated livers also were much more resilient; only 30 percent died compared with 80 percent in untreated livers — a more than two-fold improvement.

“This is a new strategy to improve liver function after ischemia/reperfusion injury, which might be important in liver surgery, and in organ storage and preservation for transplantation,” Lemasters said.

Kim and collaborators, including Christiaan Leeuwenburgh, a professor and chief of the biology of aging division in the department of aging and geriatric research and a member of the UF Institute on Aging, hope the findings will make their way into clinical applications. They are now testing various pharmaceuticals to see which can mimic the observed results with genetic manipulation, with minimal side effects.

“The basic mechanisms discovered here will lead to the next step in helping transplant surgeons find tools and ways to spur some of the pathways that are failing, and allow organs from older individuals to be successfully transplanted,” Leeuwenburgh said.

An analysis of six of the most popular nationally syndicated comic strips over the course of a year shows that women appeared less than half the time and when they did the gag was on them, said Daniel Fernandez-Baca, a UF graduate student in sociology. He presented his paper at a meeting of the American Sociological Association this week.

“When they do appear, for the most part, women don’t say anything funny or act humorously, but merely set up the joke and allow men to create the humor,” he said.

Other than being a straight man or foil to the laugh-inspiring male character, women were used mostly to reinforce certain humorous stereotypes, such as the harried or henpecking housewife, Fernandez-Baca said.

“Other research on comic strips typically looks at where women are portrayed – in the kitchen, in the work force, inside the home or out in the world at large,” he said. “This study goes a step further by asking why women are in comics in the first place and how they contribute to the humor of the situation.”

The subject is important because comic strips, like other forms of mass media, can encourage incorrect or misleading perceptions of people, especially among impressionable children and adolescents, Fernandez-Baca said. “If comics perpetuate stereotypes of how men and women are supposed to act and what is appropriate to make fun of about them, that is the way children will learn to behave,” he said.

For his study, Fernandez-Baca analyzed the top syndicated comic strips in 2008, which appeared in a minimum of 1,500 newspapers, magazines and other media outlets. These were “Blondie,” “Beetle Bailey,” “Family Circus,” “Hagar,” “Garfield” and “Dilbert.” “Peanuts” and “For Better or For Worse” also fit into this category but were not included because they no longer publish new material.

He also tallied how often female characters appeared. Because it was a leap year, this resulted in 366 observations a comic strip and 2,196 total observations. Except for “Blondie” and “The Family Circus,” women showed up in less than half of the comic strips, he said.

Women’s primary role of feeding the antics of other characters in the strip rather than instigating the humor themselves may relate to society’s attitudes about their proper place, he said.

“Because we tend to view women as nurturing and supportive, making fun or a person or situation is not the type of role we like to see for our wives and mothers,” Fernandez-Baca said. Some of these comic strips may cling to traditional values because they are older; “Blondie” started in 1930, “Beetle Bailey” in 1950 and “The Family Circus” in 1960, he said.

Compared with the shifts that have occurred in cultural perceptions about sex roles, women in these strips have changed very little, Fernandez-Baca. When they are funny, the humor follows predictable assumptions once commonly held about women’s lives, he said.

Young female characters pine for the day they can be in a romantic relationship, Fernandez-Baca said. Dolly, the girl in “The Family Circus,” for example, expresses recurring fears of how she would someday find Prince Charming when all boys are “icky,” he said.

While single women are portrayed as desperate to marry, once married they are often depicted as nagging housewives who berate their husbands, he said.

“Marriage is simultaneously the goal and curse of women in these comic strips,” he said. “They do most of the work in the home, while repeated requests that their spouses help out are often met with humorous consequences.”

Wives are often materialistic, perpetuating the idea that men make the money and women spend it, Fernandez-Baca said. In one comic strip about a shopping trip, Dagwood is shown carrying some 50 packages for Blondie, all of which are intended for her, he said.

The one place where women consistently create their own humor and actively participate in jokes is the place they have fought for years to enter: the workplace, Fernandez-Baca said. But despite being competent and useful, women are never placed in positions of power and therefore suffer at the mercy of their bumbling male superiors, he said.

While humor is generally considered positive and even therapeutic, as in the expression “laugher is the best medicine,” it also has a more serious side, even in the comics, Fernandez-Baca said.

Still, more can be done to even further reduce the number of babies born with the disease, say pediatric HIV experts at the University of Florida who this week presented their work during the 18th International AIDS conference in Vienna, Austria.

“This is one of those diseases for which we learned how to prevent transmission. We need to make full use of this method and our energies need to be focused on the effort,” said lead researcher Dr. Mobeen Rathore, a professor and chief of pediatric infectious diseases and immunology at the University of Florida College of Medicine-Jacksonville, and director of the UF Center for HIV/AIDS Research, Education and Service.

Around the United States, the decreasing number of pediatric infections is a direct result of the advent of powerful anti-HIV therapies in the mid-1990s and the establishment of protocols by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to treat pregnant women who are infected, and their babies.

Increased HIV-testing outreach and education efforts have also paid off. And CDC guidelines for “opt-out” HIV-testing for pregnant women mean testing is a routine part of their care, and women would have to specifically decline it. Rapid testing during labor and delivery gives one last chance to administer therapies that can prevent transmission.

In Florida, the Targeted Outreach for Pregnant Women Act of 1998 was enacted to help improve prenatal care and reduce the number of babies with HIV or prenatal drug exposure.

After New York, Florida has the second highest number of babies born to HIV-positive women. The state began monitoring the number of HIV-exposed babies in 2006. Up to 2008, a total of 2,374 cases of pediatric HIV/AIDS have been reported in Florida. So far this year, just one case has been reported.

“The reduction of mother-to-child HIV transmission is one of the biggest success stories of the HIV epidemic,” said Thomas Liberti, chief of the bureau of HIV/AIDS in the Florida Department of Health. “The question is, ‘How low can we go?’”

The UF researchers teamed with colleagues in the Florida Department of Health Perinatal Prevention Division to review pediatric HIV data for the period from 2002-09, and found 102 cases.

Despite the many effective measures in place to help prevent HIV-transmission to babies, there are missed opportunities, the researchers found.

Mothers of half of the infected babies tested positive for HIV before becoming pregnant. But some refused or neglected to take the medications that could have kept their babies HIV-free. Some had no prenatal care, and so did not receive available treatments.

Some women were HIV-negative at the start of their pregnancy, but became infected afterward. Others were diagnosed with HIV only after the birth of their babies. Repeat testing during pregnancy and rapid testing during labor and delivery would have alerted health care providers.

The study shows that for some women, the issue might not be a lack of availability of medical services. Mental illness, intravenous drug use and incarceration and other risk factors associated with increased risk of HIV infection affected about one-third of the women who delivered infected babies. Mental health and substance abuse issues often prevent women from taking advantage of medical care or adhering to a treatment regimen prescribed by their physicians.

Finding creative ways to address issues such as the shortage of mental health-care providers will help women and their babies get needed care, the researchers said.

The health department has already begun discussions with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to discuss steps that can be taken to further reduce mother to child HIV transmission.

“Many of our patients have mental health and other life issues, so if we do not address them, the treatment protocol will not be effective,” Rathore said. “This is an intervention that has the opportunity to work better.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Having a partner reveal his true self is much more important to women in romantic relationships than it is for men in dating the opposite sex, a newly published University of Florida study finds.

A woman is likely to report greater happiness when the man in her life presents himself as he really is rather than engage in “false” behaviors to try to please her, said Gregory Webster, a UF psychology professor and one of the study’s researchers. For men, female authenticity had little bearing on their satisfaction, he said.

“We’re not entirely sure why there are gender differences other than there is a tendency for women to base more of how they’re doing in a relationship on how happy their partner is,” Webster said. “Since women are frequently the ones ‘in charge’ of intimacy in the relationship, when men strive for openness and honesty the women’s job of regulating intimacy is made easier.”

While other studies have examined the effects of self-honesty on individual well-being, there has been little research on how it influences couples’ satisfaction, he said.

“In the past, research on authenticity has focused on how being our authentic ‘true-selves’ is important for our own happiness and well-being,” said Amy Canevello, a psychologist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. “This paper is important because it suggests that the benefits of authenticity actually reach further, affecting the experiences and well-being of those close to us.”

The study, which is published in the June issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, involved 62 heterosexual couples who had been in an exclusive relationship for at least three months, with most having dated an average of nearly 18 months. They were asked a series of questions about self-disclosure and how their partner’s authenticity affected the quality of their relationship and personal well-being.

Authentic behavior is acting according to one’s values, preferences and needs rather than engaging in “false” behaviors to please others, get rewards or avoid punishments, Webster said. It means striving for openness and sincerity in one’s intimate relationships by allowing those close to you to see “the real you,” he said.

The higher participants’ scores on the Authenticity Inventory measurement used in the study the more likely they were to behave in more intimate and less destructive ways in the relationship, which in turn meant having a more fulfilling relationship and greater personal well-being, he said.

How authentically women presented themselves did not affect men’s happiness, although revealing their real selves tended to make women function better in the relationship, which in turn improved their partner’s satisfaction, Webster said.

The age of the couples may have been a factor in why men and women reacted differently to partners not displaying their true selves, he said.

“The sample was of undergraduate college students who generally have less relationship experience than adults, and I think at that stage women are more mature in their relationship styles than men,” he said. “It could be that women at that age pay more attention to a partner’s authenticity than the other way around.”

Because “true self” behaviors can influence one’s satisfaction in a relationship, the study’s findings have important consequences over the long term, Webster said.

“It would be interesting to do this research with adults and follow them over a series of years to see which couples divorce and which ones stay together,” he said. “I would suspect that couples who are more authentic with each other are less likely to divorce, which has implications not only for the partners themselves but also if there are children involved.”

To some extent, people who misrepresent themselves may be able to repress or suppress it for a short time, but the truth is bound to come out eventually, Webster said. After finding out their partner is someone different than they thought, some people may simply find it too costly to dissolve the relationship, having invested so much time in it, even if it doesn’t meet their needs, he said.

“The take home message is ‘to thine own self be true,’” he said. “If you’re starting a romance where you’re trying to be someone you’re not in order to impress your partner, it might work for awhile, but it may ultimately hurt the relationship in the long run.”