Documenting their lives empowers HIV+ women

By participating in photo voice, a process by which individuals document their lives by taking pictures, empowered women living with HIV to realize their strengths.

Having human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes Aids, can create many challenges for individuals physically, socially and emotionally. A University of Missouri researcher found that participating in photo voice, a process by which individuals document their lives by taking pictures, empowered women living with HIV to realize their strengths in the midst of their struggles.

“In essence, the photo voice process is really about people sharing their voices through images,” said Michelle Teti, an assistant professor of health sciences in the MU School of Health Professions. “Many times, individuals with HIV are defined by other people when they face challenges, but this was an opportunity for the women to define themselves. They found value in being able to tell their stories and make sense of living with a serious and lifelong illness.”

Focusing on strengths

Women who have HIV face significant challenges because of the stigma associated with HIV and Aids, Teti said. Many women living with HIV are poor and are members of racial minorities, so many of them also experience discrimination, hunger, homelessness, and complex family lives and caregiving responsibilities, Teti said.

“When the women got the cameras in their hands, they chose to focus on their strengths, not just their challenging circumstances,” Teti said. “They were able to reflect on what they had overcome in their lives despite illness. Many women said such opportunities for reflection were few amid their other life responsibilities. The photo voice project really enabled these women to stop, reflect and think about their HIV and their lives in new and often positive ways.”

Teti and her colleagues facilitated photo voice projects for women living with HIV in three urban areas. The researchers instructed the women to take pictures to document how having HIV affected their lives. In small group settings, the women shared and discussed their images with each other. In addition, the women had opportunities to display their photos at public exhibits. Teti interviewed the women after they completed the projects to find out how photo voice had affected their lives.

Concrete expression

“It became apparent once we talked with women that the process really helped them access their strengths, realize what they do well and acknowledge their support systems,” Teti said. “Taking the pictures and capturing the images seemed to help them appreciate the present. Having something visual allowed them to concretely express their experiences while reflecting creatively. It gave them hope, made them feel stronger, and it motivated them.”

Teti said she would like to continue implementing and testing photo voice as a tool for women living with HIV. She has started conducting photo voice projects with other vulnerable populations, such as individuals diagnosed with cancer or autism, who also might benefit from the photography intervention.

The study, Taking Pictures to Take Control: Photo voice as a Tool to Facilitate Empowerment among Poor and Racial/Ethnic Minority Women with HIV, was published in the Journal of the Association of Nurses in Aids Care. Co-authors included Allison Kabel, an assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions; Latrice Pichon from the University of Memphis; Rose Farnan from Truman Medical Centre in Kansas City; and Diane Binson from The University of California, San Francisco. The National Institutes of Health partially funded the study.

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Mediterranean Diet May Help Women Live Longer, Healthier Lives

Study finds that following diet during middle age ups odds of living past 70 by 40 percent

Middle-aged women who follow a heart-healthy Mediterranean diet may live a healthier, longer life, a new study suggests.

"Women with healthier dietary patterns at midlife were 40 percent more likely to survive to age 70 or over," said lead researcher Cecilia Samieri, a postdoctoral fellow who conducted the study while at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. She is now a researcher at INSERM and Universite de Bordeaux, in France. INSERM is the French equivalent of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The women who ate healthier not only lived longer, but they also thrived. They were less likely to have any major chronic diseases and more likely to have no impairment in physical functioning, mental health or thinking skills. The research did not, however, prove a cause-and-effect link between better eating and longer life.

Samieri said she considers the 40 percent boost substantial. Those who closely followed the Mediterranean diet were more likely to live past age 70 without heart disease, diabetes or other chronic diseases. They also were more likely to be classified as "healthy agers" than those who didn't follow the diets closely or at all. However, Samieri said, "only 11 percent of our participants were classified as healthy agers overall."

The study is to be published Nov. 5 in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. It was funded by the U.S. National Cancer Institute and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

For the study, Samieri and her colleagues evaluated the diet and medical records of more than 10,000 women who participated in the much larger Nurses' Health Study. The women were in their late 50s or early 60s between 1984 and 1986, and were free of major chronic diseases. About 15 years later, they again provided information on their diet and their health.

"The Mediterranean diet is characterized by greater intake of [fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains] and fish; lower intake of red and processed meats; moderate intake of alcohol; higher amounts of [monounsaturated fats, mostly provided by olive oil from Mediterranean countries]; and lower amounts of [saturated fats]," Samieri said. Saturated fats are found in baked goods, fatty meats and other foods.

Although the study did not look at men, Samieri said, previous studies on diet and healthy aging have found no gender differences, "so it seems reasonable to believe that the benefit would be similar." She added, however, that the assumption remains to be proven.

Although Samieri did not study the effect of how long someone was on a diet, she said adopting it earlier rather than later is probably better.

What's the key to the diet seeming to give more years? Samieri said the analysis suggests that the overall healthy diet patterns had a greater impact rather than any individual food.

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