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The NIH Wants Your Health Info For Research

May Ortega | KUNM
A volutneer speaks with a participant at the National Institutes of Health's All of Us project.

 

The National Institutes of Health is in Albuquerque this week for its All of Us Research Program to better tailor medical treatment to individual people.

The NIH is encouraging locals to meet them at Civic Plaza Downtown so their health data can help with that.

If you enroll in the project, you’ll be asked for things like a blood sample and for information about your lifestyle. Then your health data will be used by scientists to develop more precise treatments for all kinds of conditions. Plus you’ll get back information about your own health and you’ll be notified about what your data helped with.

 

“One of our main goals is to be as diverse as possible while recruiting participants,” Project manager Francisco Huizar said. “There is a lot of underrepresentation in research currently.”

 

Huizar said medical studies across the country have historically focused on middle-aged white men. And this project is meant to change that.

 

The NIH’s goal is to gather information from a million people across the country.

 
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May joined KUNM's Public Health New Mexico team in early 2018. That same year, she established the New Mexico chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and received a fellowship from the Association of Health Care Journalists. She join Colorado Public Radio in late 2019.
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