Group Research Project seeks answers to questions surrounding obesity in Samoa

GRPs are small teams of undergraduate students who work with a faculty member - in this case, community health Professor McGarvey, on a project that contributes to the faculty member's research.

by Cynthia Ferguson

Until the 20^th century, Samoans were a relatively lean people and few suffered from Type 2 diabetes. Since World War II, however, Samoans - especially those living in American Samoa - have seen an alarming increase in obesity and related diseases.

Is this a result of a changing lifestyle and diet, or could the Samoans possess a gene that makes them more susceptible to weight gain? Could it be that environmental changes somehow interact with a genetic predisposition to obesity?

These are some of the questions Community Health Professor Stephen McGarvey and nine undergraduates are seeking to answer in one of a growing number of Group Research Projects on campus. GRPs are small teams of undergraduate students who work with a faculty member on a project that contributes to the faculty member's research.

With funding from the National Institutes of Health, McGarvey has been studying obesity - or, more accurately, adiposity - in Samoa for nearly a decade. In 1994 he began working with individual students supported by the Undergraduate Training and Research Assistantship (UTRA) program, but in 2002 he started recruiting undergraduate researchers to be part of a team UTRA in American Samoa and Samoa. That evolved into a Group Research Project in which the participating students receive course credit for their work and take an active part in every facet of the research.

Active indeed. In 2002 four students spent the summer in American Samoa and in 2003 three students were in the neighboring independent nation of Samoa. The students spent eight to 10 weeks in Samoa - often working six days a week - helping with the collection of blood samples, doing the lab work, taking weight and body measurements and administering questionnaires to gather family histories and data on diet. Because fasting is necessary to measure blood sugar levels, the students - accompanied by local phlebotomists - generally arrived at the huts of the Samoan participants first thing in the morning.

"Often we'd wake them up," says Stephen Hendricksen, a senior who is concentrating in human biology and who was part of the group that went to Samoa this past summer. "But everyone was always very kind to us. They always made sure we had a nice lunch when we were working in their village all day."

The students in McGarvey's group bring a range of interests and backgrounds to their work, particularly in the areas of community and international health, human biology, public health policy and development. In addition to a degree in public health, McGarvey has a doctorate in anthropology, a discipline that provides yet another perspective to the research.

It's generally conceded that modernization has played a role in the obesity now seen in Samoa and American Samoa. In American Samoa, the more modern of the two, the incidence of obesity and diabetes is in fact much higher than in Samoa. Work in American Samoa generally involves less physical activity than in rural Samoa, and the diet is higher in animal fat and processed carbohydrates. Kentucky Fried Chicken and other American fast-food restaurants are now well represented there.

But McGarvey and his students suspect something else may be at work, and that is what they hope to identify with this long-term study. Many biological anthropologists explain high rates of obesity among some modernizing populations with the Thrifty Gene Concept, which asserts the presence of some genetic factor that favors the storage of calories in the form of fat tissue.

Proponents of the theory argue that those with this gene would be more likely than others to survive in communities that experience frequent food shortages, and would, therefore, be more likely to have offspring and pass the trait on to the next generation. In a modern environment, with constant access to food and decreased physical activity, individuals with this gene would be at risk for obesity.

Armed with the data collected last summer, members of McGarvey's team are now involved in the tedious task of data entry. "We're trying to teach students what it is to do research - the boring stuff as well as the fun stuff," McGarvey explains. "It's a wonderful opportunity to see the process all the way through: collecting the data, cleaning the data, crunching the numbers, and then analyzing the results."

Students on McGarvey's GRP are: Kathryn Lafond '04, Ember Keighley '04, Marion Billings '04, Stephen Hendriksen '04, Niketa Williams '05, Olanma Okoji '06 and Jessica Beckerman '06. Two students - Priya Batra '06 and Sheila Desai '05 - have been involved in certain facets of the work.

"What's great about these groups is that we are always learning from one another," says Hendricksen. In addition to Hendricksen, Keighley and Williams spent the past summer in Samoa.