Work update

Hola de Peru! I have been working a lot lately; lots of meetings with various people including my advisor here, Dr Jaime Miranda, the program director at NHLBI, Dr Cristina Rabadan-Diehl, and the Executive Director of UnitedHealth Group (based in MN) and former BMJ editor-in-chief, Richard Smith, and attending a conference on hypertension (in Spanish) so I'm sorry if my frequent (and fun) posts have fallen behind.
My Spanish comprehension is getting much better but I find that I talk to the gringos in English a lot and so my speaking ability is vastly behind. Unfortunately, my wonderful Spanish teacher, Rosalie, is moving to Spain to start a Master's program and is leaving me :( For one of our last classes we went to see the Cuerpo Humano (BodyWorlds) exhibit that was here and I learned a lot of medical vocabulary and taught her a thing or two about the body and diseases.

Research Projects
Here's a quick run-down of the projects I'm working on. There is a potential for this to turn into a two-year assignment as there is a lot of work to do and only one of me (and Antonio the statistician I work with) to do it.
Study 1. PREVENCION (a Spanish acronym) study looked at the prevalence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors in a cross-sectional sample of the adult population of Arequipa, the second largest city in Peru. The primary investigators are Dr Julio Chirinos and his mother Dr Josefina Medina. I got IRB approval from University of Washington last week to do data analysis and write manuscripts about the normal variance of hemodynamics in this population and specifically where prehypertensives and hypertensives fall based on healthy normotensive curves. We are using measurements from impedence cardiography (something in know little about) but need to train myself in so we can use this technology for study #2 in the spring. I hope to submit an abstract to the World Conference of Cardiology by the end of this month for the Conference in Beijing, China in June 2010.
Study 2. PERU-MIGRANT (PEru's Rural to Urban MIGRANTs) study was designed to investigate the magnitude of differences between rural-to-urban migrant and non-migrant groups in specific CVD risk factors. We will be continuing field work in Tumbes, which is near Ecuador, in the mountains region of Ayacucho, and in an urban area San Juan de Miraflores. The study was Dr Jaime Miranda's PhD work and is the basis for the NHLBI and UnitedHealth Group's Center for Excellence. We will be screening an additional 2000 people for CVD and 1000 for COPD starting in March.
Study 3. LASO (Latin America Study of Obesity) study combines over 12 databases, including the two listed above, to look at epidemiological trends in Latin America. I have not submitted a project proposal yet to LASO but if I run out of things to do with studies 1 and 2 (unlikely) then I always have this one.