Dr. Suzanne McDermott (right) and Marlo Koger (left), Health Educator and Project Coordinator, discuss the grocery store tour provided to participants in the Efficacy Trial of Steps to Your Health study. Special thanks to Earth Fare for the use of their store for this photo.

Pick up any newspaper and it isn't difficult to find an article about obesity. The stories chronicle its epidemic increase among everyone from baby boomers to elementary school students. Yet despite all of the current media attention on the country's obesity problem, one segment of the population remains consistently out of the headlines.

Suzanne McDermott, Ph.D.  has made it her business to focus on obesity in people with mental retardation. The professor of Family and Preventive Medicine has spent a number of years researching its prevalence and how to address the issue in this group of adults.

In a study published in Obesity Research in 2005, Dr. McDermott and her colleagues reported results indicating that a substantial number of individuals with mental retardation who were obese at one time were likely not to be obese at a later point in time. "Everyone shows over and over again how obese the American population is," said McDermott, who served as Principal Investigator for the study and two additional related studies. "The innovation in our research is that we found that persons with mental retardation come in and out of obesity, and that's a very hopeful thing," she said.

The implications of the findings, Dr. McDermott explained, can be significant to the overall health of persons with mental retardation. "It's an area of medicine that's well worth doctors thinking about and investing in. If you have a heart attack you cannot take it away, but you can take obesity away," she said.

Subsequent research evaluated adults with mental retardation who were overweight and obese to determine if participation in Steps to Your Health, a health promotion program offered through the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, was helpful. The impact of the program, which focuses on increasing physical activity and healthy eating behaviors, was a positive one. In addition to becoming more physically active and eating better, a significant number of participants reduced their body mass index. These results were published in two journals: Health Education and Behavior in 2004 and the American Journal on Mental Retardation in 2006, and provided the impetus for a follow-up study. "Since the people who went into the program were ones who wanted to lose weight, we didn't know if they would have lost weight anyway as opposed to losing weight specifically because of Steps to Your Health," McDermott said. So "An Efficacy Trial of Steps to Your Health," funded by a Centers of Disease Control grant, will take the next three years to examine the impact of the program among people with intellectual disabilities.

Recruitment efforts to enroll individuals with disabilities, such as mental retardation, autism and traumatic brain injury, began in January and will continue for the next couple of years. Health educators will conduct eight classes with participants on a series of nutrition and physical activity topics. A trip to a grocery store will provide hands-on instruction about food selection, and on-site visits to individuals' residences will determine the best way to incorporate physical activity in their own environments. "We will be using various instruments to measure the effectiveness of the program through the participant's knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors in relation to physical activity and eating patterns," McDermott said.

McDermott is encouraged about the potential that her current research could have in reducing obesity in people with intellectual disabilities. "The risks associated with obesity are pretty daunting. This can have tremendous implications down the road," she said.

Reprinted from Connections newsletter, May 2007

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