IntroductionApproximately 26.3 million people in the United States have chronic kidney disease and many more are at risk of developing the condition. The association between specific metabolic syndrome components and chronic kidney disease in African American individuals is uncertain.MethodsBaseline data from 4,933 participants of the Jackson Heart Study were analyzed. Logistic regression models were used to estimate the odds and 95% confidence intervals of chronic kidney disease associated with individual components, metabolic syndrome, the number of components, and specific combinations of metabolic syndrome components.ResultsMetabolic syndrome was common with a prevalence of 42.0%. Chronic kidney disease was present in 19.4% of participants. The prevalence of metabolic components was high: elevated blood pressure (71.8%), abdominal obesity (65.8%), low fasting high density lipoprotein cholesterol (37.3%), elevated fasting glucose (32.2%) and elevated triglycerides (16.2%). Elevated blood pressure, triglycerides, fasting blood glucose, and abdominal obesity were significantly associated with increased odds of chronic kidney disease. Participants with metabolic syndrome had a 2.22-fold (adjusted odds ratio (AOR) 2.22; 95% CI, 1.78–2.78) increase in the odds of chronic kidney disease compared to participants without metabolic syndrome. The combination of elevated fasting glucose, elevated triglycerides, and abdominal obesity was associated with the highest odds for chronic kidney disease (AOR 25.11; 95% CI, 6.94–90.90).ConclusionMetabolic syndrome as well as individual or combinations of metabolic syndrome components are independently associated with chronic kidney disease in African American adults.

Building Collaborative Health Promotion Partnerships: The Jackson Heart Study. Background: Building a collaborative health promotion partnership that effectively employs principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR) involves many dimensions. To ensure that changes would be long-lasting, it is imperative that partnerships be configured to include groups of diverse community representatives who can develop a vision for long-term change. This project sought to enumerate processes used by the Jackson Heart Study (JHS) Community Outreach Center (CORC) to create strong, viable partnerships that produce lasting change. Methods: JHS CORC joined with community representatives to initiate programs that evolved into comprehensive strategies for addressing health disparities and the high prevalence of cardiovascular disease (CVD). This collaboration was made possible by first promoting an understanding of the need for combined effort, the desire to interact with other community partners, and the vision to establish an effective governance structure. Results: The partnership between JHS CORC and the community has empowered and inspired community members to provide leadership to other health promotion projects. Conclusion: Academic institutions must reach out to local community groups and together address local health issues that affect the community. When a community understands the need for change to respond to negative health conditions, formalizing this type of collaboration is a step in the right direction.

Background: Across complex traits, common variants explain only a modest amount of variance, with SNP-heritability consistently below heritability estimates from close relatives. Here, we examined the contribution of rare variant to tobacco use risk in up to 26,000 individuals of European ancestry in the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program with whole genome sequence (WGS;~30X coverage). Method:We grouped about 35million genetic variants by their minor allele frequencies (MAF) and linkage disequilibrium (LD) and estimated SNP-heritability for age of smoking initiation (N=14,747), cigarettes smoked per day (N=15,425), smoking cessation (N=17,871) and initiation (N=26,340) using linear mixed model. Rare variant population structure is detected and adjusted for by permutation procedure. We estimated an upper bound for narrow-sense heritability for tobacco use using available pedigrees consisting of close relatives in TOPMed.Results: Rare variants with MAF 0.1% to 0.01%, mostly from non-protein altering region, accounted for 26% of variation in age of initiation and 15% for cessation. Follow-up analysis indicated that about onethird of these rare variants contribtion is potentially confounded with rare variants structure even after adjusting for principal components. After further conservative adjustment of population structure, we estimated SNP-based heritability to be 0.21 (SE=0.08) for age of initiation, 0.15 (0.06) for cigarettes per day, 0.21 (0.09) for cessation, and 0.24 (0.07) for initiation, 1.8-4.5 times higher than previous SNP-based estimates. Our pedigree-based upper-bound for SNP-based heritability ranged from 0.18-0.35. Conclusion:The substantial contribution of rare variants for several smoking phenotypes sheds light on the missing heritability and genetic etiology of tobacco use. It also informs fine-mapping strategies since the majority of the rare variant contribution was located in non-coding regulatory regions.

Background: History has recorded the tremendous concerns and apprehension expressed by African Americans about participating in research studies. This review enumerates the collaborative techniques that were utilized by the Jackson State University (JSU) Jackson Heart Study (JHS) community-focused team to facilitate recruitment and retention of the JHS cohort and to implement health education and health promotion in the JHS communities. Methods: This review describes the evolution of the JSU JHS community initiatives, an innovative community-driven operation, during the period 1999–2018. Results: JSU JHS community-focused investigators published approximately 20 manuscripts, including community-led research and publications with community lead authors and co-authors, research and publications in collaboration with other JHS staff, through other JSU-funded projects. The JSU JHS community-focused unit also initiated the JHS Community Training Activities, developed the Community Health Advisory Network (CHAN), and trained and certified 137 Community Health Advisors. In addition, the JSU JHS community-focused unit developed the Collaborative Community Science Model (CCSM) that symbolized its approach to community engagement and outreach, and a Trust Scale for ascertaining African Americans’ willingness to engage in biomedical research collaborations. Conclusion: This review offers educators, public health professionals, and research investigators a useful starting point for the development, selection, or improvement of techniques to motivate, inspire, and engage community residents in a community–academia partnership that yielded maximum benefits in the areas of health education, health promotion and interventions, and biomedical research. Substantial, meaningful community engagement is possible when prioritizing elimination of health disparities and long-term improvement in health care access in the target populations.

This study examined: (a) differences in lung function between current and non current smokers who had sedentary lifestyles and non sedentary lifestyles and (b) the mediating effect of sedentary lifestyle on the association between smoking and lung function in African Americans. Sedentary lifestyle was defined as the lowest quartile of the total physical activity score. The results of linear and logistic regression analyses revealed that non smokers with non sedentary lifestyles had the highest level of lung function, and smokers with sedentary lifestyles had the lowest level. The female non-smokers with sedentary lifestyles had a significantly higher FEV1% predicted and FVC% predicted than smokers with non sedentary lifestyles (93.3% vs. 88.6%; p = 0.0102 and 92.1% vs. 86.9%; p = 0.0055 respectively). FEV1/FVC ratio for men was higher in non smokers with sedentary lifestyles than in smokers with non sedentary lifestyles (80.9 vs. 78.1; p = 0.0048). Though smoking is inversely associated with lung function, it seems to have a more deleterious effect than sedentary lifestyle on lung function. Physically active smokers had higher lung function than their non physically active counterparts.