Thursday, May 15, 2025
5/15/2025
Supporting Patients and Family Care Partners to Manage Chronic Kidney Disease Together - PROJECT SUMMARY Candidate: Nicole DePasquale, PhD, MSPH, is an Assistant Professor at the Duke University School of Medicine and is fully committed to becoming an independently-funded investigator at the intersection of family science and disease management. Her long-term career goal is to develop family-centered interventions that optimize individual and dyadic health and well-being among older patients with chronic disease and their family care partners. Dr. DePasquale’s multidisciplinary background makes her an ideal candidate to merge these two largely separate areas of inquiry. Her academic, research, and training experiences to date span the fields of communication, psychology, sociology, public health, and human development and family studies, and her research experiences have been both quantitative and qualitative in nature. Career development and training plan: Dr. DePasquale’s career development and training plan feature a multidisciplinary mentoring team comprising a general internist/clinical epidemiologist, geriatrician, health services researcher, biostatistician, social/health psychologist, and board-certified nephrologist. This team will support her pursuit of activities that address gaps and strengthen under-developed areas in her experience through a training plan focused on: 1) geriatric nephrology, 2) dyadic disease management, 3) advanced quantitative and qualitative research methodology, 4) intervention science, and 5) professional and scholarly development (best research practices, research collaborations, leadership, and grant writing). Additional resources to foster her career development and facilitate achievement of her training goals include Duke’s Claude D. Pepper Center; Edward R. Roybal Center; Offices for Faculty Development, Scientific Integrity, and Research Mentoring; Social Science Research Institute; and Clinical Research Training Program. Research plan: The proposed research will use different methodological to address the overarching objective of understanding the ways in which older patients and their family care partners manage the full course of chronic kidney disease (CKD) together, and how dyadic management affects individual and dyadic health and well-being: 1) quantify associations between care partner help with CKD self-management and patient self- management, depressive symptoms, and health-related quality of life over time (secondary data analysis); 2) investigate the interrelations of dyadic disease appraisal, disease management, and health along the continuum of CKD progression (primary data collection through interviews); and 3) adapt and test the feasibility of SHARE for CKD, a care planning intervention to help patient-care partner dyads work together to manage CKD. The goal of this work is to initiate a shift in focus from individual experiences and outcomes related to CKD self-management to those of both members of the care dyad, which can then be used to assist research, clinical care, and health policies in better supporting patients and care partners alike. Findings will provide Dr. DePasquale with preliminary data to refine her intervention and test its effectiveness in a R01-funded trial.
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