NIH Research Grant Awarded to Jewish Home

National Institutes of Health Awards First Grant to Jewish Home

May 15, 2005 was a banner day for the Jewish Home; the Research department, under the leadership of Janice B. Schwartz, M.D., was awarded its first grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“This is an important milestone for the Jewish Home,” says David Friedman, 2004 - 2007 chair of the Home's board of trustees. “It is very exciting to have the opportunity to do this profound research.”

“This grant represents recognition of the Jewish Home as a research institution, a peer reviewed and recognized research facility,” explains Dr. Schwartz. “It will provide a base for the rest of our efforts.”

The grant is for $212,500 per year for five years. In addition to funding direct research costs, it will cover overhead costs of running the program in the Jewish Home. While it will be based at the Home, projects will involve other nursing homes and retirement communities.

The grant has a number of projects within it with a common theme of looking at medications, metabolism rates, and responses to medications in relation to age, gender, race, diet, frailty, alcohol consumption, smoking, co-medication, and medical conditions. One of very few studies in the country focusing on older populations, it will include people over 100 years old.

The first project the grant will fund is continuing studies on the speed at which medication clears the body in elderly men and women. Begun three years ago, the research team found surprising results.

“We hypothesized that increasing age and decreased functional status would decrease clearance rate,” says Schwartz. Instead, they found that clearance rates were the highest (medications left the body at the quickest speed) in patients in nursing homes, some of whom were the oldest and sickest.

According to Dr. Schwartz, not understanding the speed at which medicines are processed through the body can result in both over- and under-medication. “We have wonderful medications today, but the wrong combinations can result in adverse drug reactions and unwanted outcomes. This is most common in older patients with multiple diseases who receive multiple drugs. It is one of the most urgent problems in the care of the elderly.”

Dr. Schwartz and her department plan to develop programs for visiting scholars to join the research and provide educational programs for healthcare professionals and the public.

“The potential impact of these findings on the care of the growing number of very old patients, especially understudied women and minority groups, is great. This is a very exciting opportunity,” she concludes.

Next: Research Center Staff