TAKE FIVE!

January 26, 2021

Jenny Sanchez:
Hello, I’m Jenny Sanchez. Welcome to Sullivan 180 Presents, lTake Five!. Our guests today are Dr. Azizi Seixas and Jakira Pachardo from the NYU school of medicine. Thank you both for joining me. Can you please introduce yourselves your titles and give us a brief introduction to what you do at NYU?

Dr. Azizi Seixas:
So welcome all. My name is Dr. Azizi Seixas. I’m faculty at NYU school of medicine and I am joined by my amazing colleague, Akira Pachardo. A lot of work that we do focuses on population health. So we want to focus on how we can improve your health at the community level. Thanks for having me.

Jenny Sanchez:
Could you please describe your research program?

Dr. Azizi Seixas:
So thank you for having us. We do a lot at NYU. We’re committed to serving the community and specifically our research program focuses on helping communities and individuals improve their overall health, specifically heart disease. We know that heart disease is the number one killer in terms of chronic health conditions for Latin X population. So our research, specifically the one funded by the national institutes of health, focuses on improving cardiovascular disease among urban and rural Latin X populations and how we are intending on doing that is by trying to understand how your sleep or your sleep problems affect their heart disease health. So I’m excited about the opportunity of sharing some of what we have learnt doing this over many years, but we’re also excited in partnering with the community both in Sullivan County, in New York City and all throughout the United States as the whole, we can improve overall health among Latin X populations.

Jenny Sanchez:
What is the focus of your sleep study?

Dr. Azizi Seixas:
So our study is called Dormir because we have done extensive work speaking to the Latin X population to see how might we suit the needs of the sleep issues that play in this community on a national level, experiences a high burden of poor sleep outcomes. It is estimated that over 36% or 40%, of Latinos suffer from insufficient sleep. Insufficient sleep is characterized as individuals who do not get enough sleep, particularly individuals who sleep six hours or less on a given night. And so there’s also work on that has shown that those sleep problems can actually cause core health outcomes such as heart disease. So for our study, what we’re trying to do is that we recognize that there is an urban and rural divide, meaning that in inner city communities, as well as rural communities, both sets of communities are characteristically different, right? In terms of geography. But what we’re seeing is potentially that there might be some commonalities between the two communities that may put them at greater risk for heart disease, as well as heart disease that might be driven by sleep problems. And so our study is really focused on engaging the community, empowering the community, providing information about sleep health so that they can improve their overall health because sleep is connected to heart disease. It’s connected to mental health. It is connected to Alzheimer’s dementia and aging. It’s connected to every aspect of our lives. And what we know is that this will be one of the first studies that will be looking explicitly at urban and rural Latinos in order for us to better serve them. And there are so many things that we can learn about these populations in our study. Now we can galvanize, we can bring the community together so that we can work toward improving the overall health of the community.