Center Line Newsletter

Volume 19, Number 1, March 2008

Bowles CAS Reaches Out to NC and the World

Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies (CAS) faculty members are working on several projects that will improve awareness, prevention and treatment of alcoholism and alcohol-related disorders. These projects target a whole spectrum of learners, from health professionals to children across the state of North Carolina and the World. These projects are supported in part by our newly funded NIAAA Center grant.

Each year, the Center co-hosts the annual Carolinas Conference on Addiction and Recovery, an educational offering that translates cutting-edge research to practice. Through a partnership with the Addiction Recovery Institute, this has become a major statewide conference. Its goal is to disseminate the latest alcohol research and treatment methods to state health professionals and professionals-in-training. The conference brings together different groups of treatment professionals providing an opportunity to exchange thoughts and ideas that range from recommendations in public policy and state support of substance abuse treatment to genetics and brain dysfunction that contribute to dependence. The conference also includes judges and others within the NC criminal justice system, as well as stakeholders in the substance abuse treatment community. It provides a forum to connect physicians, social workers, substance abuse counselors, psychologists, scientists and others that allow the Center to contribute leadership in an effort to reduce alcohol problems across North Carolina and beyond.

A new program focused on students and public service is the Bowles Fellows Program. Health professions students, including those in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, public health and social work are targeted. Each year, the CAS will fund students who have a free summer or other volunteer time, to design and implement an outreach program that focuses on an unmet alcohol-related need. The service projects focus on at-risk communities and will help develop student leadership. An initial fellowship involved medical students spending time at clinics with education-prevention materials on fetal alcohol effects available in both English and Spanish. “This program is designed to foster lifelong commitment to public service,” said Kathy Sulik, Ph.D., professor of cell and developmental biology.

CAS faculty members, in conjunction with the Office of Educational Development (OED) at UNC, continue to work to strengthen alcohol and substance abuse education in the medical school curricula. Across the Center, faculty teach aspects of the medical curriculum with the knowledge that primary care physicians can provide a major impact through screening, interventions and referrals that could change the face of addiction and abuse. “The diseases caused by alcohol and drug abuse present the largest potential for preventing human suffering and reducing costs to the society as well as to the individual,” said Robert Gwyther, Ph.D., director of pre-doctoral education. “The UNC School of Medicine offers every medical student a curriculum in the study of addiction diseases and their potential treatments.”

An outreach initiative with great success and future promise is the development of prevention and education curricula for middle and high school students. A middle school experiment-curriculum kit, “Better Safe than Sorry,” distributed over 2,000 free kits through Carolina Biological Supply Company. Each kit provides a teacher with written and video materials, fact and work sheets, transparencies, a learning game and supplies for a simple hands-on science experiment. The “Better Safe than Sorry” middle school curriculum continues to be distributed around the world. Dr. Crews estimates that 2000 kits will allow teachers to educate approximately one million students over five years. If these children share what they learned in class with their family, the impact may be even greater. Dr. Kathy Sulik and other CAS faculty are developing a new and improved prevention-education curriculum directed at high school science and health students. The curriculum will include virtual studies on fish and human development, including exposure of fish embryos to alcohol that shows alcohol’s adverse impact on embryogenesis.

In addition, working with the UNC Morehead Science Center, which serves more than 100,000 grade school students each year, the CAS is developing three educational modules on alcohol use and abuse. The Science Center employs a team of instructional designers, educators and multimedia specialists that create educational experiences for school groups. The modules will focus on fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, the juvenile brain and alcohol, and alcohol and behavior. The objective of this outreach initiative is to stimulate interest in science and clinical research, as well as inform young students of the morbidity and effects of alcohol use and abuse.

Initially, Morehead will develop fetal alcohol curricula with Dr. Sulik and other faculty involved in developing virtual and real experiments on fish embryos and alcohol’s disruptive effects on development. A second curricula will follow brain development from birth to old age, including how brain development relates to the development of abilities in music, athletic movement and personality. How alcohol can impact the brain and life course will be interwoven within the developmental theme. The final theme will involve behavior and the brain, including experiments on how motivation, anxiety and mood are studied and are changed by environment-genetic interactions. The Center hopes these efforts will impact broad groups of youth across North Carolina increasing interest in science and healthy behaviors.

The CAS has a web site that is often visited and contains information on the Center as well as a broad variety of information on alcohol and its impact on social and medical problems. It is http://www.med.unc.edu/alcohol.