UC San Francisco announced on Thursday the beginning of an LGBT study that could be the largest and the first-of-its-kind in the United States. The study will use an iPhone app to collect data that would define the health issues affecting the LGBT community and find ways to address them.
The researchers are encouraging individuals in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community to participate in the The Population Research in Identity and Disparities for Equality, or PRIDE Study, by installing Apple's ResearchKit app that contains survey questions about health issues like HIV/AIDS, smoking, cancer, obesity, mental issues and depression. The app was also developed by UCSF.
"The LGBTQ community has been understudied and underserved in health care settings,” Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the UCSF School of Medicine and director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, said in a university news release. “This timely study helps fill the gap in our understanding of health and disease risk in this population, and importantly involves and engages members of these communities in this health-related research in important and novel ways.”
The study already has 600 participants who pre-enrolled for the research. The researchers are hoping that the population will increase so that they can get more accurate data. Population-based data has always been a challenge among LGBT health studies.
"Ideally we would like to get tens of thousands of participants and follow people for decades, something like 30 years,” Dr. Mitchell Lunn, a UCSF nephrologist and co-director of the PRIDE study, told SFGate. “The goal is to figure out how being a sexual or gender minority influences physical or mental health.”
The researchers clarified that although they will be using an iPhone app data to gather data, they don't have any partnership with Apple and no data will be forwarded to the tech giant.
