Brain Fitness

An update on our brain training study: we just enrolled our 8th participant, and several participants have completed the entire study. While it’s too early to decide whether the training is making a difference, most of the participants have said they enjoyed the study. I’ll make further updates as results become available.

One of my interests in brain fitness and related strategies for maintaining cognitive function as we get older. I write a blog on brain fitness, and have an ongoing program to promote brain fitness.

See the my blog at Miami Brain Fitness.

You can also see recent posts from Miami Brain Fitness in the column at right.

Depression in Persons with HIV Infection

It’s not news that people with chronic diseases may be depressed. This is true for people with HIV infection. My colleagues and I have recently looked at this issue and have the downloadable paper on depression prevalence and treatment. We are completing a study of health literacy and medication adherence in persons with HIV infection. The study shows that both health literacy and depression may be related to medication adherence.

It was published in journal HIV Neurobehavioral Medicine in 2010. The article can be seen on the official journal website here.

Download a preprint version here.Depression prevalence and treatment in HIV (517)

Mood, cognition, and aging

My research includes work in cognition and mood in older persons.

We are currently completing a study of mood, self-efficacy, and cognitive training in community-dwelling elders.

My most cited work in the area is a meta-analysis that looked at a history of depression as a risk for Alzheimer’s disease that appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The abstract is available here.

Health Literacy

We are currently working on a project funded by the National Institutes of Health that supports the development of a health literacy measure in both Spanish and English.

We are completing a study of a computer-based intervention to promote health literacy in persons treated for HIV infection. Our results will be available soon.

I attended the 2011 annual health literacy research conference, held this year in Chicago, Illinois. Once again, it was inspiring to see how many people are working on the problems related to health literacy. I gave a paper presenting the preliminary results of our project targeting health literacy and medication adherence in persons treated for HIV infection.

I also attended the 2010 2nd annual health literacy conference in Bethesda, MD in October. It was great seeing the really work that people are doing in understanding how health literacy affects health outcomes and health disparities. I presented two posters on health literacy as well.

I currently have several NIH-funded research projects related to health literacy. I am interested with using information technologies to enhance patient health outcomes.

I am currently working on several studies of health literacy, including one that focuses on developing an intervention to improve health literacy as a way to improve medication adherence in persons with HIV infection. You can read the abstract of this grant here.

I am also currently working on the development of a new measure of health literacy and plan to tie the measure to improved interventions to improve health outcomes. Information about this study can be found here.

An article by Dr. Drenna Waldrop-Valverde and other colleagues is available on Medscape,  here. It originally appeared in AIDS and Behavior (subscription required).

Sleep

I have an ongoing interest in sleep as an important factor in cognition and mood. Our most recent data focus on sleep in persons with HIV infection and show that persons with HIV often sleep poorly. Sleep in persons with HIV infection is related to worse mood and more physical symptoms.

Recent publications in sleep:

Caregiver reports of Sleep Problems in Non-Hispanic White, Hispanic, and African American Patients with Alzheimer Dementia. In Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. To view the abstract, click here.

New approaches in the treatment of short term and middle of the night insomnia: emerging evidence for a role for sublingual zolpidem tablets. In Nature and Science of Sleep. To view the article, click here.

Welcome –

This is my website. I have some materials here for those interested in my work.