Cultivating Healthier Communities

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS

Community-based research into genetic markers for stress focuses on stress-mitigation techniques for families.

Dr. Guido Urizar noticed as a student that researchers don’t do a good enough job of getting cutting-edge research to lower-income communities, and making sure that his research benefits the people he studies has been his focus ever since. A Professor of Psychology in the College of Liberal Arts at CSULB for 16 years, Dr. Urizar researches how stress affects pregnant women, their partners, and their children. He says that his research seeks to identify “families that might be at risk for stress-related health issues to then develop free health prevention interventions for underserved communities.”

Dr. Urizar’s newest study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation with a total of $1.2 million in grants, is looking at genetic markers for stress. It looks at two types of markers. The first is the 5-HTT gene, which is nicknamed the “stress gene.” If an individual has two short versions of this gene, they are at greater risk of having health problems such as depression. The study is interested in looking at how those risks could be passed on to infants from pregnancy to postpartum. The second are telomeres, which are caps that protect the ends of our chromosomes. The size of our telomeres diminish as people age, but they can waste away more quickly given chronic stress or health problems. This research seeks to find out what the genetic markers mean for mothers as well as their infants and what factors contribute to the size of babies’ telomeres when they are born to determine if that places certain babies at greater risk for developmental problems as they get older.

But Dr. Urizar’s research goes beyond finding out what effect these markers have. It also seeks to show that those effects can be mitigated by stress management techniques, such as relaxation and exercise. “We’ve shown that we can help people develop healthier levels of cortisol over a short period of time. We’ve shown that we can do that both with moms and we can do that with babies,” says Dr. Urizar. In this way, the subjects of the research benefit directly and immediately from the research itself, including from the new technologies that the research depends on.

This study, as well as others that Dr. Urizar has led, measures the levels of cortisol and other stress hormones in saliva. This technique is less threatening for participants than taking blood samples and allows them to both participate in and gain value from the research. Dr. Urizar’s new study also makes use of technology to test for the genetic markers for stress in saliva as well as test cortisol levels in real time.

Another technique involves studying cortisol levels in hair, which displays stress levels in the body over time. A strand of hair from a newborn baby’s head contains a record of cortisol levels while the baby was in utero, and the new technologies available make it possible to read that history.

The genetic studies are conducted with four other universities: the University of California, Irvine; the University of Denver; the University of California, San Francisco; and the University of Southern California (USC). The study benefits from the expertise and resources of all of the institutions involved, and the students benefit from getting to work with leaders in the field. “These are people I didn’t know ahead of time, and they believed in our mission and agreed to work together to address important public health issues in our community,” says Dr. Urizar. He adds that they “also try to work with people in other disciplines so we can always get better and think about innovation.”

The partnership with USC has been rewarding for both institutions. CSULB students benefit from visiting USC to learn more about the biological aspects of this work, and the USC students get to go to Long Beach to work with the low-income families who benefit from the research. USC is using the stress management and intervention techniques as well, and healthcare professionals in USC’s their programs are learning how to work with their patients and provide these services for free.

Collaboration and participation underlie all of Dr. Urizar’s research, including with other research institutions in the state or around the world, but he recommends that researchers invest the time to work with community partners most of all. “What a lot of people don’t realize is that a lot of these community organizations also write a lot of grants and also publish their work. We’ve published with our community partners, and we really want to show them that we are invested,” says Dr. Urizar. His community partners include the Black Infant Health Program, the Department of Health and Human Services, TCC Family Health, M.O.R.E. Mothers, Dr. Leila Yoonessi, and other prenatal clinics serving the Long Beach community. But he says that partnering with community organizations is not unique to his programs; community involvement is common among the faculty at CSULB. “That’s one of the unique things that drew me to Long Beach,” he says.