Leopoldo J. Cabassa, assistant professor in the USC School of Social Work, will work on two new grants to study the relationship between Hispanics, diabetes and depression, and Hispanics and depression care.

Cabassa is the primary investigator on Latinos' Illness Representation of Depression, with collaborating investigators Isabel Lagomasino from the USC Keck School of Medicine and Bin Xie, a research assistant professor from the USC School of Social Work. The $36,000 one-year grant from the Frances G. and Ernest P. Larson Endowed Fund for Innovative Research will focus on understanding how Latinos perceive depression and its treatments.

"There's a lack of information about the internal barriers that Latinos experience with depression," says Cabassa. "This study will help address the gap in the literature."

He and his team will use existing quantitative and qualitative data from Lagomasino's ongoing National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded study, Patient-Centered Depression Care in the Public Sector. Cabassa seeks to improve the social worker's ability to educate patients about depression and to develop more effective, patient-centered interventions to increase treatment adherence.

The grant was awarded from the $4.6 million Larson Innovative Research Award, which comes from the former estate of Frances G. Larson, who passed away in December 2000. Larson earned her MSW from USC in 1941 and was an avid supporter of the School of Social Work. The endowment supports experimentation and creativity in teaching.

Cabassa is a trainee on another project, a $257,984 research supplement to USC School of Social Work Professor Kathleen Ell's Multifaceted Depression and Diabetes Program (MDDP) for Hispanics, a NIMH-funded clinical trial. The MDDP is a randomized clinical trial that will test the effectiveness of a health services quality-improvement intervention on improvements in depressive symptoms, patient adherence to diabetes self-care regimens, glycemic control, functional status and quality of life among low-income Hispanic adults with diabetes.

Patients with diabetes are twice as likely to experience depression as the general population, and Hispanics are more likely to have diabetes than non-Hispanic whites. Latinos are also are more likely to experience complications from diabetes and are less likely to receive care for depression. Part of the perceived reason they do not seek treatment for depression is due to the inequities in care for Latinos.

Cabassa's work adds an ethnographic component to Ell's larger NIMH-funded clinical trial. The combination of research activities, advanced training and mentoring are aimed at expanding Cabassa's expertise in effectiveness studies with low-income minority populations. He also hopes to advance his long-term career goal of developing sustainable, culturally congruent mental health treatments in primary-care settings for low-income Hispanic patients and their families.