Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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META Health

Food deserts and cardiovascular risk

Heval Mohamed Kelli, MD got some attention at the American College of Cardiology meeting over the weekend with his work on food deserts — low-income areas distant from access to healthy food.

As Medscape summarized the results: “Atlantans living in disadvantaged areas where the nearest supermarket was a mile or more away were more likely to have hypertension or hyperlipidemia, smoke, be obese, and have higher levels of systemic inflammatory markers and stiffer arteries.”

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Kelli at Clarkston Health Clinic, which Emory doctors helped establish in 2015. Clarkston is considered a “food desert”.

For more on Kelli’s journey from Syrian refugee to Clarkston, GA teenager to Emory cardiology researcher, check out this feature in Emory Magazine.

His research was conducted through the Emory Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute, using information on 712 community participants from the META-Health study and 709 Emory/Georgia Tech employees from the Predictive Health study.

Three possibilities for further investigation:

*Income, education, race and geography are intertwined. “Whether lack of access to healthy foods, low income, or low education is driving these processes needs to be further studied,” Kelli and colleagues concluded.

*For detailed maps of food deserts, not just in Atlanta and/or determined using different criteria, the U.S. Department of Agriculture makes it possible.

*This Atlantic article makes the point that “when it comes to nutrition access, the focus should be on poverty, not grocery-store location.” You can lead people to the supermarket (or build one close to where they live), but you can’t make them eat a Mediterranean diet. Studies from Los Angeles showed that obesity increased more in some neighborhoods, even despite a ban on new fast food restaurants.

Posted on April 6, 2016 by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment