The University of Louisville Alumni Magazine: for alumni, faculty, staff, students and anyone that is a UofL Cardinal fan.
Issue link: https://louisville.epubxp.com/i/705015
1 8 | L O U I S V I L L E . E D U Research Social work professor seeks to bridge family gaps It may not take a village to raise a child, but involving both parents often could be a good start. A $4.9 million federal grant to a team headed by Kent School of Social Work professor Armon Perry aims to help fathers who do not have custody grow into responsible parents who have meaningful relationships with their children and families. The f ve-year 4 Your Child project, funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families, also involves help from the state Off ce of Child Support Enforcement in recruiting participants from six test counties. Ultimately, the program is to reach 1,560 fathers. "What we've learned is that noncustodial parents tend to be more compliant with child-support orders when they have a relationship with their children," Perry said. "Research tells us over and over again that when men don't have access to (their) children, they have a tendency to disengage," he said. For their children, the results can be poverty, juvenile delinquency, lower educational attainment, psychological issues and other negative effects. And the mothers can endure more child-raising stress. The grant team will use the National Fatherhood Initiative's 24/7 Dad curriculum to help the fathers work on issues such as health, emotions, father's roles, functional co-parenting techniques and work- life-family balance. Men who experience high-conf ict relationships with their children's mothers will get additional training in co-parenting skills. Case managers will help the dads connect with community resources, information and training to better position them for hiring. "We're looking to offer people additional layers of support so they can do what society is expecting of them," Perry said. "Family is the primary institution of society." The grant involves Kent faculty members Becky Antle, Joe Brown (emeritus), Anita Barbee, Emma Sterrett-Hong and Riaan van Zyl, and communication professor Michael Cunningham. Armon Perry's chief research focus is fathers' involvement in their children's lives. Researchers fi nd association between oral bacteria and esophageal cancer School of Dentistry researchers have discovered that a common oral bacteria could be a risk factor for a type of esophageal cancer. The f ndings, published in the journal "Infectious Agents and Cancer," indicate that Porphyromonas gingivalis is present in 61 percent of patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). Studies detected P. gingivalis in 12 percent of tissues adjacent to the cancerous cells, while the bacteria was undetected in normal esophageal tissue. "These f ndings provide the f rst direct evidence that P. gingivalis infection could be a novel risk factor for ESCC, and may also serve as a prognostic biomarker for this type of cancer," said Huizhi Wang, MD, PhD, assistant professor of oral immunology and infectious diseases at the School of Dentistry. "These data, if conf rmed, indicate that eradication of a common oral pathogen may contribute to a reduction in the signif cant number of people suffering with ESCC." In collaboration with the College of Clinical Medicine of Henan University of Science and Technology in Luoyang, China, Wang and his UofL colleagues Richard J. Lamont, PhD, Jan Potempa, PhD, DSc, and David A. Scott, PhD, tested tissue samples from 100 patients with ESCC and 30 cancer-free patients. The team measured the expression of lysine-gingipain, an enzyme unique to P. gingivalis, as well as the presence of the bacterial cell DNA within the esophageal tissues. Levels of both the bacteria-distinguishing enzyme and its DNA were signif cantly higher in the cancerous tissue of ESCC patients than in surrounding tissue or normal control sites. The researchers also found the presence of P. gingivalis correlated with other factors, including cancer cell differentiation, metastasis and overall survival rate. School of Dentistry researchers Jan Potempa, David Scott, Richard Lamont and Huizhi Wang.