Principal Investigator
Dr. Tessa Crume
Dr. Crume is a perinatal epidemiologist with expertise in population-based surveillance, electronic health record (EHR) methods, and the developmental origins of cardiometabolic disease, with a particular focus on diabetes and chronic disease across childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Her research integrates EHR-based surveillance systems, record linkage and validation methods, and longitudinal cohort analyses to quantify disease burden, characterize disparities, and evaluate early-life determinants of long-term health outcomes. As a multiple principal investigator within the Diabetes in Children and Young Adults (DiCAYA) network, I contributed to scalable, interoperable surveillance infrastructure spanning diverse U.S. populations. In parallel, she has led statewide congenital heart disease surveillance efforts, advancing hybrid deterministic–probabilistic linkage methods and analytic strategies to address incomplete case ascertainment. Complementing this work, her etiologic research examines how prenatal and early-life exposures, including maternal diabetes, nutrition, and growth patterns, shape offspring adiposity, insulin resistance, and cardiometabolic trajectories. She currently serves as a consultant to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on several surveillance initiatives, including the revitalization of the Colorado Birth Defects Registry.
CO-Investigator
Dr. Dana Dabelea
Dr. Dabelea’s main research interest is understanding how early life risk factors influence obesity and diabetes throughout the lifecourse. Her experience includes studies with community-based and clinic-based sampling, longitudinal follow-up, and extensive sample collection and storage. She has conducted landmark studies on childhood type 2 diabetes among the Pima Indians of Arizona and among the Navajo Nation youth. She served as Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-Chair of steering committee at national level on the multi-center “SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth Study”. In 2009, she started a pre-birth cohort study, “Healthy Start”, which is testing the hypothesis that early life exposures program offspring growth, fatness and metabolism. This study has enrolled over 1400 mother-offspring dyads in Colorado, and children are now being followed throughout puberty locally, as well as participating in the Environmental Influences and Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) consortium. Dr. Dabelea is also the founding Director of the Lifecourse Epidemiology of Adiposity and Diabetes (LEAD) Center in Colorado.
About Our Center
The University of Colorado Denver CASSIDY surveillance team is ideally situated to generate timely and accurate estimates of the prevalence and incidence of diabetes in youth and young adults from a near complete representation of health systems throughout our state, established in the SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth, expanded in the Assessing the Burden of Diabetes by Type in Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults (DiCAYA) and further enriched for CASSIDY to allow our state to function as a health system site with a demographically and geographically representative population under surveillance for the state of Colorado.
Our longstanding leadership in diabetes surveillance and research, institutional and statewide healthcare system partner commitment and the opportunity to directly validate the coverage and representativeness of statewide, deduplicated utilization-based denominators make us a valuable partner for the CASSIDY project.
Our integrated surveillance approach was honed during our participation in DiCAYA, utilizing a combination of algorithms, incremental record linkage and chart review to identify individuals with diabetes, distinguish diabetes type and estimate date of diagnosis.
Our specific aims are:
Aim 1: SURVEILLANCE (Prevalence) — To ascertain cases of prevalent diabetes among individuals aged <45, by age, sex, race/ethnicity, geography and diabetes type.
Aim 2: SURVEILLANCE (Incidence) — To ascertain newly diagnosed diabetes cases in young adults age <45 years at diagnosis, by age, sex, race/ethnicity, geography and diabetes type.
Aim 3: EVALUATE PUBLIC HEALTH SURVEILLANCE METHODS — To evaluate the strengths and challenges of our integrated surveillance approach to determine the burden and risk of diabetes among youth and young adults by assessing validity, completeness and representativeness of case ascertainment methods and the potential utility of utilization-based denominators.
