UCLA KING DREW RRCMOH

University Of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

The immense racial, ethnic, and cultural richness of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area is unparalleled in the United States. Correspondingly, however, the social disparity between minority and majority populations is all too evident--leading, even, to overt civil unrest in recent years. It is within this context that the UCLA-King/Drew Regional Research Center for Minority Oral Health (RRCMOH), Phase I, was initiated on September 29, 1992. Its two-fold mission is to train minority researchers and to improve the oral health of racial and underrepresented minorities in the single largest population center in the Western United States. The present Phase II application seeks continuation funding to allow the Center to build upon the substantial accomplishments of the Phase I program and to achieve the Center's long- term objectives: (1) To study oral health problems uniquely relevant to the needs of minority populations. (2) To expand research and research training opportunities for minority scientists by encouraging their participation in oral health research. (3) To develop and strengthen the biomedical and behavioral oral health research capacity of the Charles R. Drew Medical University/Martin Luther King, Jr. Medical Center. The Phase II Center will continue to develop and conduct multidisciplinary research on three key aspects of oral health-related morbidity, disability, and mortality among minority populations. Each corresponds to a major subproject and each shares the common theme of orofacial injury. The Phase II Center is based on the unifying conception that minority populations in the United States suffer disproportionately the consequences of orofacial injury. They are the victims of violence and bear a disparate share of the short-term and the long-term consequences of acute and chronic orofacial injury. African-American and Hispanic minority populations, in particular, exhibit a familial predisposition toward abnormal soft tissue repair secondary to injury and they are disproportionately vulnerable to oral malignancy arising from long-term, low-grade traumatic injury to oral mucosa. The Phase II subprojects and pilot projects therefore address (a) the increased vulnerability of minority populations to serious orofacial trauma (Subproject 1 and Pilot Project 1), (b) the increased predisposition of such populations to abnormal healing after sustaining such injury (Subproject 2 and Pilot Project 2), and (c) the disproportionate vulnerability of such populations to overt malignant neoplastic disease consequent to chronic oral injury (Subproject 3 and Pilot Project 3). These are not classic dental diseases in the usual sense, but they are all identified, appropriately, in the NIH/NIDR Phase II Program Announcement as important areas relevant to minority oral health needs. More importantly, they reflect the pressing, practical, and real-life oral health research needs of minority populations in an urban setting.