Tag Archives: health

LGBTQ+ health disparities and the impact of stress

Correlation does not equal causation. This phrase gets mentioned a lot in science. In part, because many scientists can fall into the trap of assuming that correlation equals causation. Proof that this phrase is true can be found in ice cream and sharks. Monthly ice cream sales and shark attacks are highly correlated in the United States each year. Does that mean eating lots of ice cream causes sharks to attack more people? No. The likely reason for this correlation is that more people eat ice cream and get in the ocean during the summer months when it’s warmer outside, which explain why the two are correlated. But, one does not cause the other. Correlation does not equal causation.

To date, much of the research that has been conducted on LGBTQ+ health has been correlational. Our guest this week, Kalina Fahey, hopes that her dissertation project will play a part in changing this paradigm as she is trying to get more at causation. Kalina is a 5th year PhD candidate in the School of Psychological Science working with her advisors Drs. Anita Cservenka and Sarah Dermody. Her research broadly investigates LGBTQ+ health disparities and how stress impacts health in LGBTQ+ groups. She is also interested in understanding ways in which spiritual and/or religious identities can influence stress, and thereby, health. To do this, Kalina is employing a number of methods, including undertaking a systematic review to synthesize the existing research on substance use in transgender youth, analyzing large-scale publicly available datasets to look at how religious and spiritual identity relates to health outcomes, and finally developing a safe experiment to look at how specific forms of stress impact substance use-related behaviors in real time. 

Most of Kalina’s time at the moment is being spent on the experimental portion of her research as part of her dissertation. For this study, Kalina is adapting the personalized guided induction stress paradigm, with the aim of safely eliciting minor stress responses in a laboratory setting. The experiment involves one virtual study visit and two in-person sessions. During the first visit, participants are asked to describe a minority-induced stressful event that occurred recently, as well as a description of a moment or situation that is soothing or calming. After this session, Kalina and her team develop two meditative scripts – one each to recreate the two events or moments described by the participant. When the participant comes back for their in-person sessions, they listen to one of two different meditative scripts and are asked a series of questions regarding their stress levels. Kalina and her team also are collecting saliva and heart rate readings to look at physiological stress levels. This project is still looking for participants. If you are a sexual-minority woman who drinks alcohol, consider checking out the following website to learn more about the study: https://oregonstate.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8e443Lq10lgyX66?fbclid=IwAR3XOdECIOvCbx1xn3QA5rrCtHfSezZrR5Ppkpnd9sx1SsicZRQnfYHAqb8. Kalina hopes to continue experiment-based research on LGBTQ+ health disparities in the future as she sees the lack of experimental studies to be a major gap in better understanding, and thereby supporting, the LGBTQ+ community.

Interested in learning more about Kalina’s research, the results, and her background? Listen live on Sunday, January 15, 2023 at 7 PM on 88.7 KBVR FM. Missed the live show? You can download the episode on our Podcast Pages! Also, check out her other work here or finder her on Twitter @faheypsych

Small fish, tiny bacteria, big impacts

We eat food to keep ourselves happy and healthy. While the foods we eat are degraded in our gut, it’s actually little microbes that do most of the work to break down our food. Many many microbes. It is well known that our diet controls our health. But until recently, we have not appreciated the intermediate step that relies on microbes in our gut, and their influence on our health. What if our gut microbes are just as important for human health as the food we eat? The so-called gut microbiome, the unique community of microbes living in our digestive tract that influences how we break down food, is the quickly evolving research area that our guest is interested in. Michael Sieler is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Microbiology Department and is interested in better understanding how environmental factors, like rising temperatures and pathogens to name just a few, influence our gut microbiome and thus our health.

Michael Sieler is a 3rd year PhD student in the department of Microbiology at Oregon State University

There are hundreds of  different microbial species living in human guts. These microbes work together to support human health by helping us digest our food and fight off pathogenic microbes. Because humans eat a multitude of diets, it can be tricky to figure out how human health is influenced by our gut microbes if the things we eat are not consistent. Instead of forcing humans to undergo rigorous eating and environmental trials – that may even be unethical given how much we’d need to control a human life – researchers like Michael use different organisms that are similar to humans to help understand some of the fundamental drivers of health. While you may be thinking of mice trials to see how toxic a substance is, or if we’ve successfully created a non-hallucinogenic version of psilocybin for therapeutic purposes, mice still have plenty of limitations. 

Instead of using mice to run experiments, researchers are increasingly using zebrafish because they’re well studied, easy to grow and maintain, fast to reproduce, and 70% of their genes overlap with human genes so we can generally use these little fish as models of larger humans. For example, we’ve interviewed previous guests like Grace Deitzler researching how the gut microbiome can influence anxiety disorders and the connections to autism spectrum disorder. We’ve also interviewed Sarah Alto who researched how different levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide are connected to stress responses. Finally, Delia Shelton is actively researching how cadmium, a toxic heavy metal, is influencing behavioral patterns. You can imagine these studies would be tricky to perform on humans, that’s why all of these researchers use zebrafish as their model organism. 

Michael’s research uses the zebrafish model organism to answer questions about how the gut microbiome influences the health of its host.

Michael’s work focuses on how environmental factors impact our gut microbiome to influence our health. For example, exposure to antibiotics or pathogens can dramatically affect the microbes living in our guts, but so can our diet. Surprisingly, unlike other model organisms such as mice, zebrafish are not fed a consistent diet across research studies and facilities. Given the importance of the gut microbiome to digest food and support our health, inconsistent use of diets in zebrafish microbiome studies could lead to inconsistency in study results. It’s like trying to compare race times for a five-mile race, except some people get to use cars and bikes and unicycles. Without a standard way to compare people, how comparable are the race results? Michael’s current work seeks to address this conundrum by feeding zebrafish one of three commonly used research diets and comparing their microbiomes. He finds that type of diet has an overwhelming effect on their gut microbiome, and these effects may overwhelm the effects of other environmental factors, like pathogen exposure.

What does this mean for the mountain of research built on zebrafish? We’ll answer that, and so much more with our guest Michael Sieler. We’ll also discuss his non-traditional route to graduate school, his love of travel, a side project using a tamagotchi-style video game to teach students about fish health, and how a year in the Guatemalan countryside helped him rethink his relationship to food and how he could have a greater impact in our world. Tune in live on Sunday at 7pm PT on 88.7FM, or check out the podcast if you missed the interview. 

In the summer of 2012, the seeds for Michael’s interest in science were planted while working alongside Guatemalan community members and agronomists

Fitness for Life: Sport psychology and the motivations behind healthy lifestyles

Portrait of Alex Szarabajko

For graduate teaching assistant Alex Szarabajko, being part of the team teaching the 3,000-plus students who take Lifetime Fitness for Health (HHS 231) every term is not just a job. “It’s the last time students are able to learn about physical activity, nutrition and mental health before adulthood, ” says Alex. The course, which tied for first place in a “Best of 2020” vote, lays a foundation for healthy habits by addressing physical activity, nutrition, and mental health. Alex started work on her doctorate in Kinesiology at Oregon State University in 2018 after completing master’s degrees in General Psychology and in Exercise and Sport Science at Eastern Kentucky University. As a researcher in the field of sport psychology, Alex works to understand the reasons that people pursue their fitness goals and engage in healthy behavior. 

Alex sprinting at a track meet.

Alex first came to the United States to work as an au pair in Bethesda, Maryland. Her host family were very enthusiastic about college sports. In particular, Alex wanted to know: “Why are they so popular?” In her native Germany, university sports are not taken seriously. Instead, serious athletes are members of athletic clubs. If athletes are paid at all, it is typically only a small amount. With the exception of footballers, most elite German athletes need supplemental income, often from a career in a more traditional domain. (Link 2)  Alex was excited by the idea of college athletes having national attention and earning scholarships through sport. Perhaps this was a way that she, too, could continue to compete, at least for a few more years. After returning to Germany and resuming track and field practice at her local club, Alex began applying for college in the United States. She was recruited by Eastern Kentucky University on a track and field scholarship. 

Starting out, Alex thought she had her career path figured out. As a freshman at EKU she was required to go to a majors expo, which she reluctantly attended. At the expo Alex found a booth advertising the field of sport psychology, an experience she describes as an “immediate lightbulb.” She promptly changed her major to psychology to prepare for graduate work in sport psychology.

Following the completion of her bachelor’s degree, Alex stayed at EKU in order to do graduate work under the tutelage of Dr. Jonathan Gore. Psychologists use the term intrinsic motivation to describe actions inspired by internal rewards. For example, a person playing a sport just for fun is intrinsically motivated. Extrinsic motivation describes actions influenced by others. An employee performing a task that they personally don’t care about is extrinsically motivated. Working with Dr. Gore, Alex examined a third type of motivation, relational motivation, among athletes. Relational motivation is defined by the needs of a group. Initially, Alex expected to find that athletes in team sports like football and basketball were more relationally motivated than athletes in individual sports. To their surprise, she found little difference between sports. Instead, she found differences between the levels of relational motivation among female athletes and male athletes. She found that female athletes’ performance was significantly linked to relationships between athletes and coaches.

In 2018, Alex left Kentucky and came to Oregon. She arrived at the start of the academic year, never having been to Oregon before. It didn’t take long for her to feel at home. “I just fell in love with Oregon when I got here,” says Alex. “I was able to go to the coast, go to the waterfalls.” Being near to Eugene (Track Town, USA) is also a bonus: that’s where the 2020 Olympic trials for track and field are being held. Being raised by Polish parents in Germany, Alex speaks both languages fluently and holds citizenship in both countries. She’s volunteered as an official translator for the Polish national team in the past, and hopes to volunteer again for either the German or Polish team.

As a graduate student in Kinesiology with a Psychosocial emphasis, Alex is focusing now on health and fitness in adults, rather than only among adults who consider themselves athletes. About 10 years ago, her advisor, Dr. Bradley Cardinal, carried out a study examining required health classes in colleges and found that since 1930 the number of schools requiring a course in fitness and healthy living has dropped from 80% to 39%. Alex is interested in finding out whether this trend has continued since that study was carried out. Oregon State’s version of the class, Lifetime Fitness for Health, has adapted with time to address student needs. In particular, student responses to end-of-class surveys resulted in the addition of a mental health component the class, which initially only focused on physical activity and nutrition. Alex hopes to uncover more about how required health classes across multiple universities have adapted to changing needs of students, and whether the number of schools requiring such classes has continued to drop.

Tune in Sunday, February 2nd at 7pm on 88.7 FM or online to learn more about Alex’s research and her personal journey!