1. State your health outcome of interest. (It could be the one you used for week #2 or another one.) Pick two key behaviors that are important factors leading to your health outcome. Explain the importance of these behaviors either for etiology, prevention, or intervention. (If none of the behaviors in the readings are important for your health outcome, suggest another behavior that is.)
Symptomatic fibroids can impact a woman’s every day routine. Smoking, lack of physical activity, and obesity can all be linked to the severity of fibroid symptoms. However, I am interested in health-related quality of life outcomes, such as energy/mood, sexual function, and autonomy, specifically symptom improvement. Important behaviors that determine whether women seek treatment pertain to noticing/acknowledging painful symptoms and healthcare utilization. On average, women wait about three years before obtaining treatment for fibroids. They often fail to discriminate between normal menstrual flow and abnormal bleeding, or pelvic pain. This may be tied to social/ cultural norms regarding pain, or lack of anatomical knowledge. Healthcare utilization relates to intervention, either related to financial barriers or because of personal sentiments toward medical establishments, make it difficult to seek help.
2. Describe how you would study the role of one of the behaviors described for question #1 and your health outcome of interest. Incorporate a social factor (e.g. race/ethnicity, social exclusion, stress) in the study approach.
To study how personal understanding of fibroid symptoms affects overall quality of life and symptom improvement , I would first try to understand the pathway(s) by which it is mediated. I would likely construct a descriptive study to understand culturally-driven health beliefs, regarding pain management and reproductive familiarity within different communities, to serve as a starting point. This would provide insight into whether the issue is rooted on race/ethnicity, stress, or access to knowledge, and move onto a different study approach.
3. If key health behaviors (e.g. smoking, exercise, nutritious diet) are strongly influenced by neighborhood, income, and/or education, do we need to continue to study how these behaviors influence health outcomes? Why or why not?
Health behaviors should be studied continuously. Because they are so context dependent, they need to be looked at carefully to fully understand how they are experienced. Given ongoing disagreement within the literature, there needs to be an effort to understand health behaviors mechanistically within our own research, in the hopes of leading to productive individual and group based interventions.