In This Issue: Chronic Disease Care
From the Acting
Chief Research and Development Officer
VA Research Week 2016 will take place May 16-20. The theme of this year's observance is "The Path of Progress." While VA facilities throughout the nation will hold open houses and other activities, I'd like to mark the event by discussing an important recent development that has helped VA progress along our path of service to Veterans: Health Service Research & Development (HSR&D)'s Center of Innovation program...
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New Initiatives
On March 7-8 2016, VA's Health Service Research and Development (HSR&D) service held a state of the art (SOTA) conference to discuss issues relating to weight management. More than 40 VA and outside experts participated.
Upcoming SOTA conference on pain management
VA will hold a SOTA conference in November 2016 on non-opioid alternative approaches to managing pain. The conference will focus on four types of pain interventions, including complementary and integrative health; cognitive behavioral therapy and other psychological approaches; rehabilitation, including structured exercise and spinal manipulation; and non-opioid drug therapy.
In 2015, VA's New England Healthcare System (VISN 1) and the Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center instituted a clinical program to help Veterans who have been newly diagnosed with non-small cell lung center. The program is now available to all VA facilities nationwide. And it will receive funding from VA's Cooperative Studies Program to conduct precision oncology trials
A Chat with Our Experts
From 2006-2013, Dr. Robert Kerns was VA's national program director for pain management. He served as special adviser for pain research from 2013 until early 2016. He was the first director of the PRIME Center, the only federally funded pain research center in the United States, from 2008 through 2016. VARQU spoke with him about VA's accomplishments in pain management research
Noteworthy Publications
Gerontologist supplement highlights VA research on health issues affecting older women Veterans
Teams of VA and non-VA researchers recently prepared a series of articles to investigate how and why women Veterans' health differs from that of their counterparts who did not serve in the military. Data for these analyses came from the
Women's Health Initiative (WHI), one of the largest American prevention studies, and the largest, most ethnically and geographically diverse study of women in the U.S.
Depression is more the
cause of poor health behaviors, such as smoking, low levels of physical activity, poor sleep quality, and poor adherence to doctor's orders, than a
consequence of those behaviors. That's the conclusion of researchers with the
Heart and Soul Study who looked at symptoms of depression and lifestyle behaviors in 667 Veterans with stable coronary heart disease over a period of five years.
Diet and cardiovascular disease in women
The linkage between a Western-style diet and cardiovascular disease in women was explored in two recent articles by a research team from the Harry S. Truman VA Medical Center in Columbia and the University of Missouri.
