School Notes: School of Public Health
November/December 2011

Training center will span two states

A new public health training center based at YSPH will allow for a vastly expanded training program for the public health workforce in Connecticut and Rhode Island, with a special emphasis on addressing health disparities such as HIV/AIDS in underserved communities. A $2.6 million federal grant creates the center, which will be housed at YSPH, along with a satellite center located at Brown University.

The two-state program will significantly augment existing public health workforce training and is expected to reach hundreds of practicing public health professionals in a variety of local and state governmental agencies and community health organizations. Students and faculty from Yale, Southern Connecticut State University, the University of Connecticut, Brown, and other academic institutions will be engaged in a broad-based effort to improve community health outcomes. Training will cover areas as diverse as technological skills, environmental health, public health leadership, and cultural competency.

Genetic link identified in brain tumor

Researchers have found a significant link between the most common type of brain tumor in the United States—meningiomas—and a patient’s family history, suggesting that genetics play an important role in the development of the potentially debilitating lesions.

The YSPH-led study compared 1,124 patients with the intracranial tumors with a nearly equal number of control subjects from different regions of the United States and concluded that an inherited gene (or genes) for meningiomas appears to be involved in the tumor’s onset. Meningioma patients were 4.4 times more likely than their peers in the control group to report a first-degree family history (e.g., parents, offspring, and siblings) of the tumor. Patients with a second-degree family history (e.g., grandparents, uncles and aunts, and grandchildren), meanwhile, had an elevated but not statistically significant risk compared with their control peers.

During the five-year study, the researchers also found that the meningioma patients had greater exposure to ionizing radiation (which is suspected to cause tumors) through previous radiotherapy for illnesses such as leukemia and thyroid cancer. The findings were published in the Journal of Neurosurgery.