UAB Division of Transplantation Assistant Professor Rhiannon Deierhoi Reed, MPH, DrPH, has won a one-year Deep South Resource Center for Minority Aging (RCMA) Pilot Grant Award. The award is supported by award number P30AG031054 from the National Institute on Aging.

The Deep South Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (RCMAR) is a collaborative partnership of four unique, Southern institutions with complementary strengths: Morehouse School of Medicine, Tuskegee University, University of Alabama, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The Deep South RCMAR focuses on health problems that are particularly prevalent among older African Americans in both rural and urban settings.

Reed and her team will use the grant to explore whether there is an association between serving as the primary caregiver for a kidney transplant recipient and long-term healthcare utilization among living kidney donors who were obese at the time of donation. Drawing from donors enrolled in Dr. Jayme Locke’s R01 (1R01DK113980), she will examine whether obese donors who were also the primary caregiver for their transplant recipient experience greater use of healthcare services (hospitalization and emergency department use) post-donation than their counterparts who did not serve in a primary caregiving role.

Reed and her team will also explore patterns of utilization by age, ethnicity and geography, in order to improve our understanding of the role of caregiving among a growing subset of older minority donors. Reed is looking forward to the findings of her research.

“Our findings will provide novel insight into obese caregiver living donors, a group that has not previously been studied, by examining patterns of healthcare utilization, with future plans to explore healthcare cost analyses and interventions to address utilization in this population,” said Reed.