Children who grow up in Arkansas have a harder time with asthma than their peers elsewhere, and a scientist at Arkansas Children’s Research Institute (ACRI) and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) hopes to discover why.
Akilah Jefferson, MD, MSc, an early career researcher at Arkansas Children’s Research Institute, will use a $662,000 four-year award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore why asthma is uniquely troublesome for Arkansas children. Jefferson is also an assistant professor of pediatrics in the Division of Allergy and Immunology at UAMS College of Medicine. She treats children with allergies and immune conditions at Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH) and Arkansas Children’s Northwest (ACNW).
Asthma is among the most common childhood conditions and can be especially daunting for children in under resourced and rural areas. In Arkansas, children living in rural communities often face higher rates of asthma, especially those from minority backgrounds or low-income families. They are also much more likely to have complications from asthma that put their lives at risk.
Jefferson and her research team will explore factors like a child’s home environment, access to healthcare and the quality of care they receive. They will also examine how different communities and healthcare providers might contribute to these disparities.
“A child’s zip code should have nothing to do with how easy it is for them to breathe. Arkansas children need our help to determine why asthma is so challenging in our state and to create new ways to help them,” Jefferson said. “Our goal is to ensure that every child, regardless of where they live, has the chance to breathe easy and thrive."
By learning more about these factors, Jefferson hopes to develop targeted interventions that can improve asthma outcomes for children in rural Arkansas. This could include providing better education about asthma management, increasing access to healthcare, or addressing environmental factors that can trigger asthma attacks.
The funds are awarded through NIH’s Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development (K23) program, designed to provide “protected time” for clinically trained researchers to receive intensive, supervised research training in biomedical research. The award supports a period of supervised research and research career development to prepare the candidate to successfully seek an NIH R01 or equivalent major research grant by the end of the award period. Tamara Perry, MD, chief of allergy and immunology at Arkansas Children’s and a professor of pediatrics in the UAMS College of Medicine, serves as Jefferson’s mentor on the project.
This work was supported by the UAMS Translational Research Institute, which is funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health, grant award Kl2 TR003108.