There's a new health policy challenge in developing countries. Though many see chronic conditions like type-2 diabetes and heart disease as problems plaguing the wealthiest nations, "Nearly 80 percent of the deaths worldwide from these two diseases are coming from the developing world," says Sanjay Basu, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.
But Basu is working to change this statistic, and his efforts just won him the $100,000 George Rosenkranz Prize for Health Care Research in Developing Countries. Administered by Stanford's Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the award will help fund Basu's large-scale data collection project in India. With a data set from over 65,000 people, Basu hopes to improve type-2 diabetes screening in the country, leading to better treatment and detection of the disease.
A researcher focused primarily on global development and human health, Basu is also an internal medicine physician with a master's in medical anthropology and a doctorate in epidemiology. In the following Q&A, he discusses his current research interests and plans for the future.
How did you first become interested in global health policy and the developing world?
As a child, our family went back and forth between the United States and India, and the contrasts in daily life were striking and overwhelming. There is a sense in many parts of India that life is a privilege, and a constant struggle to maintain.
Your research in India will involve data collection and mathematical modeling, which sounds rather abstract. How does this work translate into real-world improvements in people's health?
Our research serves as a bridge between the clinical science of how to prevent and treat disease, and the detailed operations of how to actually deliver better prevention and treatment in the real world. What we specifically do is combine biological and clinical data with data on program reach, budgets, and operations. In other words, we might learn how to build a car in a textbook, but our models look at how to make the car factory operate optimally so that the product, in the end, is drivable. We've worked closely with both government agencies and non-governmental groups to deliver programs in real-world populations, and to continuously improve those programs over time. For example, our work on how to introduce better tobacco control programs in India has actually resulted in recent legislation that has lowered tobacco use in some critical parts of the population.
What's different about approaching chronic disease prevention in India versus in the United States?
The sheer size and diversity of the population is one big difference. India is four times the size of the United States, and far more diverse. There is simultaneously malnutrition and obesity, starvation and type-2 diabetes, vitamin deficiency and heart attacks - often in the same city. That means designing programs for a country - or a province, or even a city - requires a lot of attention to complicated perverse outcomes that may happen. For example, we've looked into reducing sodium intake as a strategy to lower hypertension and cardiovascular disease. But we also have to make sure that we don't generate iodine deficiency since salt is the major delivery strategy for iodine and, unlike the United States, iodine deficiency is a serious concern in India.
What are the policy implications of your research?
Within tight budgets, we seek to inform what policies will most likely generate population health improvements with minimal perverse outcomes. The key question right now is how to find needles in a haystack: people who have diabetes in a population of 1.3 billion who theoretically are at "high risk" by standard definitions. Within available budgets, it's not possible to screen everyone door to door. The question is how to find these folks within the limits of current infrastructure, or how to build better infrastructure without taking away funding from other important causes.
What's next for you? What other research projects might your laboratory pursue down the road?
We are expanding our analysis of actual healthcare outcomes among populations. We're studying "natural experiments" in which similar populations experience very different health policies—such as new insurance, prevention, and treatment programs. And then we follow those folks as they move through similar processes of economic development, urbanization, and cultural change to find out "what works" and what fails in improving population health outcomes.
Kylie Gordon works on the digital media team at Stanford University Communications. She received her undergraduate degree from Stanford in Modern Thought and Literature and has a graduate degree in Creative Writing from Northwestern University.
Previously: Study shows banning soda purchases using food stamps would reduce obesity and type-2 diabetes, Stanford’s Sanjay Basu named a Top Global Thinker of 2013, Could a palm oil tax lower the death rate from cardiovascular disease in India?, Can food stamps help lighten America’s obesity epidemic? and New evidence for a direct sugar-to-diabetes link
Photo of George Rosenkranz with Sanjay Basu by Adam Gorlick
