Stress and human health in diabetes: A report from the 19th Chicago Biomedical Consortium symposium.

Stress and diabetes coexist in a vicious cycle. Different types of stress lead to diabetes, while diabetes itself is a major life stressor. This was the focus of the Chicago Biomedical Consortium's 19th annual symposium, "Stress and Human Health: Diabetes," in November 2022. There, researchers primarily from the Chicago area met to explore how different sources of stress - from the cells to the community - impact diabetes outcomes. Presenters discussed the consequences of stress arising from mutant proteins, obesity, sleep disturbances, environmental pollutants, COVID-19, and racial and socioeconomic disparities. This symposium showcased the latest diabetes research and highlighted promising new treatment approaches for mitigating stress in diabetes.

One size does not fit all: an historian's perspective on precision diabetes medicine.

This article offers an historical approach to exploring precision medicine's potential for reducing health disparities in diabetes. It examines case studies from the twentieth-century USA, from early twentieth-century beliefs that Jews were most at risk of developing diabetes to claims in the 1980s that Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans had the greatest likelihood of developing the disease. These case studies reveal that attempts to understand perceived health disparities have long tended to focus on the biology and behaviours of the unwell, while paying less attention to food security, workplace hazards, access to quality healthcare and other social determinants of health. The precision medicine initiative, I argue, has an opportunity to right this imbalance by leveraging the tools of big data to learn more not only about biomarkers but also about the social and physical environments in which people live and work.

Public health literacy defined.

Public health literacy is an emerging concept necessary to understand and address the broad array of factors, such as climate change, globalization, and poverty, that influence the public's health. Whereas health literacy has traditionally been operationalized as an individual-level construct, public health literacy takes into account the complex social, ecologic, and systemic forces affecting health and well-being. However, public health literacy has not yet been fully articulated. This paper addresses this gap by outlining a broad, new definition of public health literacy. This definition was developed through an inductive analytic process conducted in 2007 by a multidisciplinary research team, and two expert-panel sessions were convened to assess the consensual validity of the emergent definition. Based on this process, public health literacy is defined as the degree to which individuals and groups can obtain, process, understand, evaluate, and act on information needed to make public health decisions that benefit the community. Three dimensions of public health literacy--conceptual foundations, critical skills, and civic orientation--and related competencies are also proposed. Public health literacy is distinct from individual-level health literacy, and together, the two types of literacy form a more comprehensive model of health literacy. A five-part agenda is offered for future research and action aimed at increasing levels of public health literacy.