The University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville received a $3.4 million research project grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The five-year grant will support research focused on the use of physical activity to treat disease and promote health. A program called Exercise is Medicine Greenville was launched in 2016 to identify and enroll eligible patients in community-based physical-activity programs designed to prevent, manage and treat their chronic diseases.

“This research is a big step toward helping health care systems promote physical activity in the communities where our patients work, live, pray and play,” said Jennifer Trilk, director of USC School of Medicine Greenville’s lifestyle medicine programs.

USC School of Medicine Greenville partners with Prisma Health and the YMCA of Greenville and Oconee Counties to operate the EIMG model. Meenu Jindal, medical director of Prisma Health’s internal medicine clinics, said the model provides an opportunity for health care providers to work with patients who can’t afford a physical-activity program otherwise or have unique lifestyle challenge to help them stay healthy.

Read more when you click here to visit the Greenville Journal article.

Structured physical activity (PA) programs help to prevent and manage chronic diseases, yet systematic approaches to identify and enroll patients in these programs are lacking. Exercise is Medicine Greenville (EIMG) is a novel clinic-to-community model that identifies patients with chronic diseases in primary care settings and connects them to a structured, evidence-informed, community-based PA program. This study assessed influences on PA program enrollment using a mixed methods design. Methods: Data were collected from 12 clinics over 18months. Electronic health record data were used to quantitively compare the characteristics of referred patients who did versus did not enroll. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a subset of non-enrollees to elucidate barriers and facilitators to enrollment.

Read more & view the study’s results and conclusions here in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health.

The following is an excerpt from The Wall Street Journal article by Laura Landro, and can be viewed in its entirety by clicking here.

An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure, but medical schools have traditionally given little weight to instruction on how to help patients live healthier lives.

The future could look different as schools and residency training programs have begun to embrace a field known as lifestyle medicine, weaving teaching on nutrition, exercise and other healthy behaviors into the core curriculum of medical education. This new push aims to provide doctors with tools to tackle chronic but often preventable conditions such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes that affect six in ten adults in the U.S.

“Incorporating lifestyle medicine into medical-school curricula can resolve the inadequacies that exist in preparing physicians for the growing challenge of chronic disease,” says Jennifer Trilk, professor of biomedical sciences and director of lifestyle-medicine programs at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville, which in 2017 became the first medical school in the U.S. to incorporate more than 80 hours of lifestyle-medicine training over four years of undergraduate education.

A number of U.S. medical schools have begun to adopt lifestyle medicine or embed some of it in their programs. Among them are those of Brown University, Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Oklahoma, historically Black colleges and universities including Morehouse School of Medicine, and schools of osteopathic medicine.

The approach is part of a broader movement to improve health and close gaps on racial disparities in healthcare, as research points to the benefits of healthy behaviors in preventing, treating and even reversing common chronic diseases. A study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology last year projected an increasing prevalence of heart disease and diabetes by the year 2060 among Black and Hispanic populations, which have historically had poor access to quality care. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites chronic diseases as leading drivers of the nation’s $4.1 trillion in healthcare costs. And while the U.S. healthcare system has traditionally paid doctors to treat disease rather than prevent it, the opportunity to reduce costs is spurring new reimbursement models from Medicare, private insurers and employer health plans that offer clinicians incentives to prevent disease.

Moving through Cancer (MTC), an initiative of Exercise is Medicine® and the American College of Sports Medicine, has created a beautiful, comprehensive patient booklet on physical activity during and after cancer treatment. The information is based on the latest evidence-based guidelines and was developed by the Moving through Cancer Task Force. Physical activity during and after cancer treatment can result in fewer side effects, faster recovery, and reduced recurrence in some cancers. This booklet is designed for patients, caregivers and providers to both inspire and educate. Please share the link with your colleagues and patients.

Looking for a fountain of youth? You may need to search no further than your sneakers.

Exercise, particularly high-intensity interval training, encourages your cells to make more proteins to feed their energy-producing machinery — and this arrests the aging process, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Cell Metabolism.

“Any exercise is better than being sedentary,” said Dr. Sreekumaran Nair, senior author of the study and a diabetes researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. However, Nair noted that high-intensity interval training (HIIT), in particular, is “highly efficient” when it comes to reversing many age-related changes

High intensity interval training involves short bursts of intense aerobic activity within a stretch of more moderate exercise: intermittently sprinting for 30 seconds, for example, in the middle of a moderate-pace jog.

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