Researchers get $3.1 mil. gov't grant

The Nursing School received a federal grant totaling approximately $3.1 million from the National Institutes of Health, school officials said yesterday. The grant will fund a study that aims to provide a more efficient way for mothers to breast-feed their low birth-weight infants, according to Assistant Nursing Professor Linda Brown, who chairs the Health of Women and Child-Bearing Families division of the Nursing School. "This research represents another example of the important contributions nurses make to the delivery of health care," Nursing School spokesperson Susan Greenbaum said. Researchers at the University of Illinois-Chicago, New York University and Philadelphia-based Thomas Jefferson University will share the grant. But Brown is the principle investigator in the study. The researchers will not begin the study until the beginning of next year, Brown said. The entire project, which will be conducted at Jefferson, is expected to last five years. The study has been made a national priority because low birth- weight babies are at a higher risk of becoming sick through infection, and breast-fed infants are more immune to infection. Brown said the research team hopes to find more efficient ways of breast-feeding smaller infants. The study will consist of two sets of women. The first group will serve as a control group. These mothers will follow the conventional procedures recommended by hospitals, Brown said. The second set, or the experimental group, will be exposed to the new methods developed by the team of researchers, she said. Brown added that she is very optimistic about the impending study. "It's a very exciting piece of work for me," she said. The study "will begin to assist women who want to breast feed, and will help them achieve their personal goals." Illinois Nursing Professor Paula Meier, an expert in the medical intervention of breast-feeding high risk infants, will be responsible for developing many of the research techniques that will be employed in the study, Brown said. Steven Finkler, an economist and accounting at NYU, will conduct the cost-analysis for the study.