Ganesa Wegienka
University of Michigan, MI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Uterine fibroids are noncancerous tumors of the uterus. They can cause heavy menstrual bleeding, anemia, pelvic pain, infertility and pregnancy complications.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
uterine fibroids
uterine leiomyomata
women's health
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2029
What they work on
- Assess how repeated self-reported stress and adverse life events over 10 years relate to uterine fibroid onset and growth measured by ultrasound in the SELF cohort of young Black women in Detroit.
- Determine how community-level stressors, measured with the Area Deprivation Index, Index of Concentration of Extremes and Childhood Opportunity Index 2.0 from lifetime residential histories, and family socioeconomic status contribute to fibroid incidence and growth.
- Test whether positive resources such as coping, resilience, religious involvement and social connection change the associations between lifetime stressors and uterine fibroid incidence and growth.
More about the research
More than 70% of people in the United States with a uterus will develop them, and fibroids are the leading reason for hysterectomy. Black women develop fibroids more often, are diagnosed and undergo surgery at younger ages, and on average have more and larger symptomatic tumors than White women. Why fibroids start and grow, and why these differences exist, remains poorly understood. This project asks whether stress across a person's life, and the positive resources that buffer it, help explain fibroid development in Black women.
Why it matters
Uterine fibroids cause pain, bleeding, infertility and many hysterectomies, and they weigh most heavily on Black women. Identifying which personal, family and neighborhood stressors raise fibroid risk or speed growth, and which positive resources protect against them, could point to new prevention targets. It could also help explain racial disparities in this common women's health condition.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hugh Taylor
Yale University, CT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether oral EGCG, a catechin from green tea leaves, reduces uterine fibroid size compared with matched placebo in a randomized trial of 654 women seeking fertility care.
Laura B Zahodne
University of Michigan, MI·Psychology
Follow MCAP participants for a third assessment and expand the cohort, then use latent growth curve modeling to test whether neighborhood socioeconomic status predicts differences in cognitive decline between Black and White older adults.
Hoda Abdel Magid
University of Southern California, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Estimate how socioeconomic spatial social polarization (race, income, education, segregation) relates to hypertension prevalence, new cases, treatment and control among Black and White adults in the CHS and REGARDS cohorts.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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