NAMI Ask the Expert: Achieving Ideal Heart Health in People With Mental Illness

In this webinar, Dr. Gail Daumit will review the evidence for programs that are shown to improve heart health for people with mental illness. She will both provide background on the science and studies behind the interventions and also practical strategies for people to use in their own lives and for clinicians to use in their daily work. Dr. Daumit’s research spans all heart disease risk factors and she will address diet, physical activity, weight, tobacco smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol. Attendees will leave with tools they can use for themselves, family members, people in their community and those for whom they provide services.

After the presentation, NAMI’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Ken Duckworth, will moderate a Q&A session. This session will be recorded and posted to our website within 1-2 days of the webinar ending. A typed transcription of the audio will also be provided within 1 week of the webinar ending.

Our Expert

Dr. Gail Daumit is the Samsung Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Vice Chair for Clinical and Translational Research in the Department of Medicine. She is director of Johns Hopkins NIMH ALACRITY Center for Health and Longevity in Mental Illness. After attending college at the University of Pennsylvania and medical school at Emory University as a Robert W. Woodruff Scholar, Dr. Daumit completed internal medicine primary care residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. She then came to Johns Hopkins, participating in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and General Internal Medicine fellowship and joining the faculty in 1999.

Dr. Daumit is a practicing general internist, epidemiologist and mental health services researcher whose work is devoted to improving physical health and decreasing premature mortality for persons living with serious mental illnesses. Dr. Daumit has obtained continuous NIH funding for this work since 2000, including 12 investigator-initiated grants. Her current projects — the ALACRITY Center and a newly funded NIH project named DECIPHeR — focus on testing implementation strategies to scale up evidence-based interventions to decrease cardiovascular risk for persons with serious mental illness in community mental health settings. For this work she partners with community mental health organizations and a broad range of stakeholders.

Dr. Daumit’s clinical trial of a behavioral weight loss intervention for persons with serious mental illness, the ACHIEVE trial, was the first long-term clinical trial to demonstrate that a behavioral weight loss intervention was successful in persons with serious mental illness. ACHIEVE won the Society for Clinical Trials of the Year in 2014. Dr. Daumit also served on the World Health Organization Guideline Development Group for Identification and Management of Physical Health Conditions in People with Severe Mental Disorders. At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Daumit was awarded the Department of Medicine David M. Levine Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2018. She has mentored over 25 junior investigators and has authored over 90 publications, including 40 publications with a mentee as first author.

Read the Transcript

NAMI Ask the Expert is an informational webinar series and is not intended to provide medical advice on any specific topic or for any specific individual. The series is made possible through the generous support of people like you. If you’re enjoying this free program, please consider donating at NAMI.org/donate.

For questions or troubleshooting, contact us at [email protected].