Professor Greg Miller explains his work in disadvantaged US communities to improve physical health through relationship-building and community-based social interventions.
Most common, disabling and expensive health problems begin during childhood and adolescence, are influenced by behavioural, genetic and environmental factors, and pattern according to socioeconomic status.
Professor Miller outlines the key brain networks involved in regulating behaviour which can be influenced by stress. He presents work showing that murder rates in Chicago (an environmental stress) correlates with body mass index, fat levels, cholesterol levels, and other indiciators of cardiometabolic health. He then goes on to discuss how interventions to support these networks early in life among children exposed to social and economic adversity can improve their physical health decades later.
Professor Miller’s work tries to answer the mechanistic questions of how early adversity affects vulnerability to diseases, and how interventions that can build resilience through leveraging relationships within families and between peers can support healthy development for children and provide opportunities for evidence-based policy interventions.
Professor Greg Miller is the Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and Co-Director of their Foundations of Health Research Center.
This talk was given as part of the the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Symposium: Behaviour change to improve health for all
https://acmedsci.ac.uk/more/events/behaviour-change-to-improve-health-for-all
This symposium was co-hosted by the US National Academy of Medicine and the UK Academy of Medical Sciences.
Find out more about the US National Academy of Medicine
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