Sisters Devoted to Medical Research
By Julie Anderson, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.
Apr. 23–Sister Rosalima Wilkinson still remembers the year she picked the Hershey’s bar.
It was the first year she participated in the Omaha Nuns Study, a Creighton University project launched in 1967 to better understand osteoporosis.
Choosing the chocolate bar meant she had to eat a whole one every day for eight days straight, along with the same breakfast, lunch and dinner.
“That was one of the hardest things to get done,” said Wilkinson. “I wasn’t used to eating candy.”
But Wilkinson — who actually loves chocolate, in moderation — choked down her daily bar for the sake of science.
And over the next 40 years, the metabolic data gathered from Wilkinson and 190 other nuns yielded much of what researchers know about the calcium economy of women in midlife, including providing insights into osteoporosis, a condition characterized by fragile, fracture-prone bones.
“It’s not a hard thing to do at all, if it’s going to help somebody,” Wilkinson said. “We had no idea who would ever get osteoporosis, because we were in our 30s then.”
On Wednesday, Wilkinson and more than two dozen other participants in the study — now in their 70s and 80s — will gather at Creighton University Medical Center for a 40th anniversary reunion. They’ll even get milk mustaches and pose for photos.
“We just thought it would be fun to have a little get-together,” said Rita Ryan, the now-retired nurse who has been involved in the study from the start.
Dr. Robert Heaney, the Creighton professor of medicine who designed and directed the project, said the researchers are “immensely grateful” to the nuns.
“If people didn’t let you put them under a microscope and observe what was going on with their bodies, we wouldn’t know,” he said.
The Omaha Nuns Study provided the principal scientific basis for federal recommendations on adult calcium intake. More recently, it contributed data used in establishing guidelines for potassium intake.
Among the findings were that healthy women in midlife require 1,200 milligrams of calcium a day and that calcium absorption is influenced by factors such as body size, vitamin D and estrogen levels, age, race, the source and quantity of calcium in the diet and other nutrient interactions.
“We’ve fundamentally drawn the map,” Heaney said.
In the 1960s, however, the connection between calcium and osteoporosis hadn’t been recognized. Heaney wrote in a textbook chapter at the time that calcium intake appeared unrelated to the condition.
When he started to investigate the condition in the early 1960s, he started with people who already had it. He soon realized he had hold of the wrong end of the stick, so to speak, and conceived the idea of studying healthy women in midlife.
Nuns were a logical choice, he said, because they have continuity in their lives.
He approached six mother houses, got their permission and invited nuns to join the study. Most of the participants joined right away; about two dozen more signed up 10 years later.
Every five years, the nuns reported a few at a time, first to the old St. Joseph Hospital on 10th Street, then to the 30th and California location that would later become Creighton University Medical Center.
For eight days, they’d eat the same foods in the same amounts. They chose the foods from a list ahead of time, with the menus designed to match within 5 percent their usual intake of calories, protein, calcium and phosphorus.
Wilkinson, now 77, retired after 50 years of teaching and living in Council Bluffs, recalled that participants had to eat every gram, even scraping their plates clean.
“Everything you took in, they calculated,” she said, “and everything that came out of you. Everything, dear.”
The eight-day studies ended in 1995. By that time, the project had received continuous federal funding for 28 years.
That made it one of the longest-running, continuously supported projects in the history of the National Institutes of Health, according to Dr. Robert Recker, director of Creighton’s Osteoporosis Research Center.
Ryan said some of the nuns — usually 15 or more a year — still come in occasionally for followup tests — calcium absorption studies, X-rays and bone density scans.
Ryan, who remains involved in the project, keeps in touch with the nuns. About 50 have died. She sends Christmas cards each year, as well as health questionnaires to determine whether the nuns have suffered fractures, begun taking osteoporosis medications or been diagnosed with the condition.
“I could tell stories about every one that was in,” she said. “You know them very well, and you keep in contact with them.”
—–
Copyright (c) 2007, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.