Cuts to NIH Grants Undermine Years of Research Progress on LGBTQ Health
Pride Month has been celebrated every June since the Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969, when a police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar led to six days of clashes between police and activists and helped spark the gay rights movement in the U.S. and globally. The federal government officially recognized Pride Month in 1999.
Columbia Nursing has long been a leader in research on sexual and gender minority (SGM) health. This work continues, but several pivotal studies dedicated to SGM health ended prematurely when the administration terminated millions in National Institutes of Health funding to the university.
Learn more about three of these critical research projects and the investigators who led them:
Professor Walter Bockting, PhD, is co-director of Columbia Nursing’s Center for Sexual and Gender Minority Health Research (CSGMHR). Project TIES, his study examining the role of social connectedness in mental health and aging of gender minority people of color, was terminated. This study aimed to examine social support among this population in New York City and New Orleans, develop and test a structured interview guide to assess their social networks in detail, and subsequently identify what network characteristics buffer the impact of stigma and discrimination on the health and longevity of gender-diverse adults living in the United States. If allowed to continue, findings from the study would inform interventions and services to improve social support and mental health in this minority population.
Professor Tonda Hughes, PhD, is executive director of CSGMHR, and an internationally recognized expert on substance abuse among lesbian and bisexual women. Two of her grants were terminated, including funding supporting the Chicago Health and Life Experience of Women (CHLEW) Couples study, an extension of a 25-year longitudinal study of risk and protective factors associated with sexual minority women’s drinking that has produced more than 80 publications to date. Her other terminated grant was for the first full-scale randomized clinical trial of an intervention to reduce alcohol use and improve mental health among sexual minority women.
Associate Professor Corina Lelutiu-Weinberger, PhD, conducts research to support groups with pronounced health concerns by targeting sources of stigma and related pathways posing barriers to health that fuel mental health, substance use, and HIV-related disparities. One of her terminated studies included a five-year intervention to reduce structural racism in HIV care clinics in the southeastern U.S., which has been linked with poor engagement in care and increased mortality. Her second terminated study was a three-year intervention that introduced pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a life-saving medication to prevent HIV infection, to Romania, a country where AIDS-related deaths are high and just 1.1% of individuals at high risk for HIV are able to access PrEP.