February 12, 2004

Faculty honors

Two Feinberg School of Medicine research projects have been selected by the Arthritis Foundation among the top 10 advances in arthritis and musculoskeletal diseases for 2003.

The researchers cited are Dorothy Dunlop, research associate professor at the Institute for Health Services Research and Policy Studies at the medical school, and Leena Sharma, M.D., associate professor of medicine.

Research by Dunlop and her colleagues, supported by an Arthritis Foundation clinical science grant, studied disparities in rates of joint replacement surgery among African Americans and Hispanics as compared to whites.

Their research analyzed interview data from a long-term, national population study of 6,159 older adults to compare arthritis-related joint replacement rates among these groups. They found that older African American and Hispanic adults reported a significantly lower rate of joint replacement surgery — about two-thirds the frequency of whites. This disparity was not explained by differences in geographic characteristics, health status or economic access.

The researchers suggested that racial and ethnic differences in medical decision-making, preferences for treatment and other social and cultural factors need to be explored.

Sharma’s research, funded by the Arthritis Foundation, looked at the gap between research and practical exercise recommendations. The study suggested that strong thigh muscles in those with misaligned or lax knee joints did not protect and may actually worsen knee osteoarthritis — a finding that Sharma cautioned does not negate the importance of exercise but which does underscore the need to correct misaligned and lax knees and to develop and test muscle strengthening exercise programs that are geared toward patients with those symptoms.

Overcoming barriers to physical activity for people with arthritis will require the concerted efforts of many, the study found.

Peter Scheuermann, professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been elected to the rank of IEEE Fellow in recognition of his contributions to logical and physical database design.

IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., a technical professional association with more than 380,000 members from 150 countries.

Scheuermann is one of the pioneers of the Entity-Relationship (ER) model, used for conceptual database design. His research covers the entire spectrum of physical database design, including indexing, spatial storage structures, parallel I/O systems and performance evaluation. In particular, Scheuermann has been credited with the development of a number of widely accepted dynamic storage structures. His work on load balancing in disk arrays has had a major impact in the field and also has applicability to Web caching and replication.