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New
Challenges for Behavior Researchers A UCSF researcher today will urge her fellow behavioral and disease prevention scientists to tackle new health problems, such as the rising rates of injury and infectious disease. "The challenges that we confront now and new ones that the millennium will bring call for us to value all that we have learned and to move ahead," says Margaret Chesney, PhD, co-director of the UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies and researcher at the new UCSF Center for Social, Behavioral and Policy Sciences. She will deliver the keynote address today at the 18th annual Society of Behavioral Medicine meeting in San Francisco. "Early work on the importance of coronary prone behavior in causing heart disease and on effective strategies for smoking cessation were important achievements," she says. Now, the challenge is to identify risk factors for diseases other than heart disease, and to tackle other health behaviors, including sexual practices and injury prevention. Researchers have been and are looking at behaviors that cause heart disease and cancers--diseases that primarily affect the elderly--but also should focus on causes of death and disability among other age groups, she says. "When we look at younger age
groups, we see that death and disability are largely due
to injuries," Chesney says. As such, researchers
should study the behavioral risk factors for injury,
including the role of alcohol in auto crashes. About 40
percent of all motor vehicle accidents can be attributed
to alcohol use, Chesney says. Chesney urges colleagues in her field to be prepared for the future, saying that behavioral scientists were "caught off-guard" by HIV disease. Chesney asserts that though researchers responded to that challenge, "we could do better by more thoroughly mapping the territory of behavioral medicine." 1st appeared 4/17/97 |
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