Rhonda Spencer-Hwang, DrPH, MPH, once dressed up as a “pirate” doctor and danced on a stage at an elementary school fair to attract children and their parents to sign up for a health study. It was 2012, and she was using a $2-million grant from the First Five Riverside Commission to provide educational services and conduct research among 10,000 children and families in Riverside County, searching for why asthma was so prevalent in that community and how the health issue could be addressed.
But in the course of her research, Spencer-Hwang soon realized Riverside children were dealing with chronic diseases in addition to asthma. She also began to understand the types of stresses these families dealt with daily — poverty, anxiety, homelessness, broken families and many others.
Spencer-Hwang, an associate professor at Loma Linda University School of Public Health and a researcher for the school’s Center for Community Resilience, says there’s a growing body of evidence that links a wide range of stresses a person experiences in childhood to developing chronic diseases in adulthood, thereby reducing longevity.
[For more on this story by Larry Becker, go to https://news.llu.edu/wholeness...ng-aces-by-lifestyle]
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