DEARBORN — Oakland University’s School of Nursing has been awarded $72,921 from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation in support of its Improving Health Behaviors in Arab American Youth project. 

The initiative launches this month in Dearborn, the city with the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States. 

“This project has a special emphasis on obesity prevention and is targeted at reducing the number of chronic illnesses for young Arab Americans,” said Suha Kridli, Ph.D., the grant’s principal investigator. “We are going to offer specific guidance and provide practical tools that can improve students overall health while lowering health care costs.”

Dr. Kridli added, “Prior research has shown the growing prevalence of type-2 diabetes and obesity in the Arab American community, yet there have been few, if any, youth-focused programs that specifically address these issues.” 

Kridli has conducted health related research for 18 years, with much of it centering on the community. She is extremely passionate about Arab American health issues. 

Kridli says the initiative specifically targets young people because obesity related issues should be tackled early in life before they become major problems. 

Using cost-effective, community-based approaches, Kridli and her team will measure the effectiveness of a translated and culturally adapted health education curriculum delivered by trained high-school aged mentors.

That high school mentor program’s success will be compared to the same content delivered by an adult group leader in a classroom setting. The effect of parental engagement on each method will be measured. 

Parents will play a vital role in the process of helping children maintain healthy eating standards. “Parents are a piece of it. They will teach the kids to eat healthy. Educating the parents and kids is important,” Kridli said. 

Students from two schools in the Dearborn area will participate in the project. It will utilize unique resources and partnerships among Oakland University, Wayne State University, the Dearborn Board of Education and Dearborn school system.

“Our School of Nursing, inline with our University, believes in community engagement and therefore our faculty research and programs often have a community focus,” said Dean Kerri Schuiling. “We have an emphasis on keeping our communities healthy and doing what we can to improve the health of our communities.”

Kridli says using the same research to understand and help treat Arab Americans in the United States and Arabs living abroad, is not always the best idea. She said the two groups lead very different lifestyles, and are exposed to different environmental factors that make them more vulnerable to certain diseases.

“This population is not the same as the population in Jordan, for example. Those in Jordan and around the Middle East are exposed to so many different health risks than people in western countries,” she said. 

She also noted that Arab Americans are reluctant to seek preventative care, which is a major issue. 

Breast cancer is preventable with early detection, and it is more treatable the sooner a diagnosis receives medical attention. However, for too long cultural inhibitions have stood in the way of Arab American women opening up candidly about the disease or getting the medical care they need to fight it fast enough.  

“Some wait too long until it really spreads and becomes unavoidable,” Kridli said.

Kridli is one of several people concerned about the amount of research that has been conducted to address Arab American health issues. 

She says there is so little research available that when she does publish something on the subject, a lot of requests are made for it.

In order to support the launch of the project, Kridl needed to find a study that proved obesity is an issue in the Arab American community. Her search took days. “There is room for a lot of research in this community,” she said.