Deaf Weight Wise is a 16-week healthy lifestyle program developed by Deaf researchers at the NCDHR in collaboration with Deaf community members. The program, which was created to address a leading health issue among Rochester’s Deaf communities, promotes physical activity and healthy eating and provides Deaf-to-Deaf peer support.
In a clinical trial conducted in Rochester, Deaf Weight Wise helped participants lose weight. Sixty-two percent of Deaf Weight Wise participants lost a clinically meaningful amount of weight compared to 18 percent of Deaf sign language users in the control group.
“We’ve shown that this first-of-its-kind program works,” said NCDHR Director Steven Barnett, MD. “Now, we want to make it available to Deaf communities across the country who could benefit from it. At the same time, we will study how to implement it with different communities—that have different levels of needs and resources—and how to make it sustainable.”
So far, Deaf Weight Wise has only been available in Rochester, a well-resourced city with one of the largest per capita Deaf populations in the nation, and surrounding communities in Western and Central New York. Now, NCDHR will partner with organizations nationwide to implement Deaf Weight Wise in their communities.
“We’re really looking forward now to collaborating more nationwide—looking out to the nation and external networks to advise us on how to make this program work for them,” said Lori DeWindt, MA, a senior health project coordinator in the NCDHR who is part of the Deaf Weight Wise team. “Deaf Weight Wise is such an important program and we know there are a lot of people out there who could benefit from it.”
Depending on each community’s needs and resources, NCDHR will either train a local Deaf resident to be a Deaf Weight Wise counselor or will run the program remotely using one of its existing Deaf counselors.
As each partner implements the program, NCDHR will track the facilitators and barriers to implementation in each setting. They hope to come up with a playbook that any community could use to stand up a local, long-term Deaf Weight Wise program.
"This will impact so many Deaf communities,” said Nicole Coppini, a Deaf Weight Wise counselor. “This is beneficial because Deaf Weight Wise is provided in our own language so we can understand it clearly. The communication access is there and you have that support, too. It’s wonderful.”
NCDHR, now part of the University of Rochester Clinical and Translational Science Institute, has been funded through the CDC’s Prevention Research Centers program since 2004. The University of Rochester is one of 20 Prevention Research Centers to receive the latest round of awards and is the only Prevention Research Center that focuses on the health of Deaf sign language users and people with hearing loss.