Q&A
Addressing cardiovascular health and diabetes challenges
0:27:24
·
4 min
Council Member Schulman inquires about DOHMH's strategies for addressing cardiovascular health and diabetes challenges. Dr. Morse outlines their approach and upcoming initiatives to tackle these chronic diseases.
- Upcoming chronic disease report focusing on material needs, commercial determinants of health, and healthy living behaviors
- Use of a database to monitor diabetes prevalence and inequities across the city
- Discussion of innovative approaches, including potential personalized diet studies and addressing material needs for those with diabetes
Lynn Schulman
0:27:24
So you also mentioned in your testimony the two areas that are somewhat challenging, cardiovascular health as well as diabetes.
0:27:31
Do you have anything in particular that you'd like to maybe do differently and maybe think out of the box a little bit?
0:27:38
Because it's always been an issue.
Michelle Morse
0:27:40
This is true, chair.
0:27:42
This is a a big challenge, and cardiometabolic disease, cardiac, and diabetes related disease has been the number one cause of death for many, many years outside of the COVID pandemic.
0:27:51
So we are familiar with the challenges of addressing chronic disease, and we have more work to do.
0:27:56
We're very excited to, in early 25 2025, be releasing a chronic disease report that focuses on 3 main areas of work.
0:28:05
The first is material needs.
0:28:07
That's what does someone need to be able to live a healthy life, whether that's housing, transportation, you know, support for buying healthy and nutritious food, those kinds of things.
0:28:18
The second area is commercial determinants of health.
0:28:21
These are what are the practices of corporations that either facilitate or undermine healthy choices, and that includes areas like alcohol and, you know, tobacco and other areas.
0:28:32
The third area of focus in our chronic disease report is on healthy living and healthy behaviors.
Lynn Schulman
0:28:37
So things like
Michelle Morse
0:28:37
our active design guidelines are one of the areas that's described in
Lynn Schulman
0:28:39
the report.
Michelle Morse
0:28:39
So we do have, what we think is a a really powerful report that's going to set a powerful course forward for some of the work city government can do in preventing and addressing chronic diseases.
0:28:54
And as a practicing clinician, I will also say that diabetes and cardiac disease is one of the biggest challenges we face.
0:29:02
When I work at Kings County, I see the complications of those chronic diseases in particular every day, and there is more work to do.
0:29:10
And then the final thing I'll mention is that we do have a database that allows us to monitor diabetes, both the amount the prevalence of diabetes as well as uncontrolled diabetes across the city.
0:29:21
Every year we submit a a report to council on that, diabetes, prevalence, and we look at it by population, we look at it by neighborhood, we look at it by income level.
0:29:33
What we have found year after year is that there is a large, large inequity in the prevalence of diabetes.
0:29:39
So for example, there's almost a 2 times higher prevalence of diabetes in some areas of the South Bronx as as compared to Greenwich Village in SoHo.
0:29:49
So we know that we need to focus on the neighborhoods where diabetes is a major challenge.
0:29:54
We also know that we need to focus on New Yorkers who are living with low wealth.
0:29:59
The gap in diabetes prevalence for the highest wealth neighborhoods as compared to the lowest wealth neighborhoods is significant.
0:30:06
So those are the kinds of data that help guide the health department in deciding where to implement programs, where to focus our resources, and how to engage with New Yorkers experiencing complications from diabetes.
Lynn Schulman
0:30:18
Yeah.
0:30:18
Offline, I wanna have a conversation with you, because we're getting into budget season about what maybe we can do beyond the the the normal course of business.
0:30:29
The other is that I just wanted to ask you and this is just out of the box.
0:30:32
So I don't know if you're aware, NIH is doing this massive study right now about individual health diets for health diets for individuals based on their metabolism and they have they have, it was on, one of the news shows either CBS This Morning or something like that where they have people who have volunteered and they live, live, on campus where they're doing this and they have them eat certain meals and it's it's geared towards their exact makeup, their their genetic makeup, their, all kinds of things.
0:31:15
So it's an individual diet for folks.
0:31:17
And I it's a massive study.
0:31:19
I don't know.
0:31:19
I mean, you know, the the administration's coming to an end.
0:31:22
I don't know if they're gonna continue it or not, but it maybe it's something to take a look at.
