By Shelia Watson
Contributing Writer

Chandler Church, a senior at Porter-Gaud School, spent the bulk of last summer poring over statistics on the cost-effectiveness of HIV testing in the Veterans Affairs system, foregoing the typical teen summertime.

The result of her work was the presentation of her research project at the 36th annual S.C. Junior Science and Humanities Symposium held Jan. 26, 2007, at the University of South Carolina.

“I did not end up as a finalist, but the presentation was well received,” she said.

Church was the only student from the Lowcountry to participate in the symposium. The Junior Science and Humanities Symposia program is sponsored jointly by the departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force, in cooperation with leading research universities throughout the United States.

The primary aim of the JSHS is to promote original research and experimentation in science, engineering and math at the high school level and to recognize students for outstanding achievement. The program provides a forum for high school students to present the result of original research as well as an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas, interact with practicing researchers and explore future academic and career opportunities.

The categories for research include: behavioral and social sciences, earth and space sciences, medicine and health, biochemistry, engineering, microbiology, botany, environmental sciences, physics, chemistry, gerontology, zoology, computer science and math.

Church’s choice of topic was inspired by her father’s work as a physician in infectious diseases at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center.

“I’ve always been interested in the work he does with infectious diseases,” she said. “And the thought of merging a statistical model with the data was fascinating.”

Using specific data from the VA along with more general data from other sources, Church set out to determine how cost effective it would be in the long run to do early and routine testing for HIV.

“What I was determining was cost per life, the number of dollars it cost to do the test divided by the life years saved (by being able to treat the patient earlier), adjusted for quality of life,” she explained.

The project factored in the total cost of screening versus how many people are detected to have HIV and are able to begin treatment before they came to the hospital with an AIDS event. Church’s research estimates that currently only 45% of those with HIV are diagnosed early enough to be given promising treatment before the disease progresses into AIDS.

“My project figured in how many more (cases) would be caught, and it was estimated that one and a half life years could be saved,” she said. “That would save money but it also figured in how many transmissions (from those who were unaware of their illness, to their partners) would be stopped.

“It’s a fairly simple model as these go. It’s not as multi-layered as some. But I’ve gotten great feedback from the results and the fact that it takes into account most of what it needs to.”

Church’s mentor was Kit Simpson, a professor of health administration and policy at the Medical University of South Carolina.

Simpson does economic studies both for pharmaceutical companies, specifically with big companies that manufacture AIDS drugs, and for the National Institute of Health to examine whether new treatments coming online can bring good value for the money. She worked with Church during the summer, teaching her the best methodology for the project.

“Chandler is an exceptionally bright and mature student who worked as independently as many of the graduate students I work with,” Simpson said. “She was doing work on a level that I usually assign to graduate students, and she did an outstanding job identifying issues and doing both the math and the conceptual design of the study.”

The project was quite innovative and one Simpson said she feels the medical community should begin studying.

“With AIDS, we’ve been asking for a long time the economic value of making changes,” she said. “To be blunt, that disease has been more prevalent in ‘disenfranchised’ patients, so in the early stages (of discovering the disease), there was a resistance to spending a lot of money on these patients. But documenting what can be saved, in money and in lives, is well worth it, especially with new drugs and new treatments.”

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