CRPH Win Wellcome Trust Grant

"Too often in our work we go into local communities, collect data, and then leave, but this time we are concentrating on culturally motivated intervention. The focus is on the intervention, on eventually making a long-term difference in the lives of low-income women living in the suburbs of Beirut."

Professor Marwan Khawaja of the Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) was talking about a grant recently awarded by the Wellcome Trust of the United Kingdom to the Center for Research on Population and Health (CRPH). The grant, in the amount of $410,406 for a period of three years, will be used for an intervention study on mental health and medically unexplained symptoms of gynecological disease.

The study team consists of seven faculty members from the FHS-Marwan Khawaja, Monique Chaaya, Faysal el-Kak, Loulou Kobeissi, Rima Nakkash, Sami Ramia, and FHS Dean Huda Zurayk, as well as Brigitte Khoury of the Faculty of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry; and two faculty members at Bristol University in the UK-Ricardo Araya of the university's Academic Unit on Psychiatry and Tim Peters of the Department of Community Based Medicine. The team will focus on the role of health in promoting general well being while maintaining human dignitiy.

Professor Khawaja, director of the study, described the stressful lives of women living in the southern suburbs. The team members will, of course, be conducting laboratory tests for infections, but even more importantly they will assemble baseline data on mental health, record demographic and reproductive histories, and examine socio-economic and behavioral risk factors. The community-based, six month-long psychosocial intervention will provide structured social support groups and physical relaxation sessions to evaluate the possible relationship between women's anxiety and depression and complaints of medically unexplained symptoms of gynecological disease.

The multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary nature of the study will bring together faculty members from epidemiology, public health, medicine, sociology, demography, human behavior, and statistics, while at the same emphasizing community participation. Implementation of the full study is planned for the fall semester of 2008-09, depending on satisfactory completion of the preparatory study.

The expected long-lasting, meaningful intervention of the study will also include an evaluation of the overall quality of life of women living in poor suburban neighborhoods. The findings of the research will be available in international journals, research briefs, local workshops, and in various electronic media.