Youth Firearm Injuries
DeMello receives grant to study consequences
Annalyn DeMello, a new addition to Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth Houston’s Department of Research, wants to learn more about how surviving a gunshot injury shapes a young victim’s behavior and attitudes towards firearms.
Surviving an interpersonal gunshot assault may be a strong predictive factor for different types of recurrent violence, said DeMello, PhD, MPH, RN, CNE. Firearms are the leading mechanism of death among youth, and a far greater number survive nonfatal gunshot wound injuries.
DeMello recently received a five-year, $751,345 career development grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Nursing Research at the National Institutes of Health. The award will fund her project, “A Longitudinal Mixed Methods Study of Psychosocial Behavioral Health after Non-Fatal Firearm Injuries among High-Risk Youth” (K23HD112596).
An alumna of both the Bachelor of Science in Nursing and Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing programs at Cizik School of Nursing, DeMello previously worked at two pediatric hospitals. Most recently, she taught at The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston before joining Cizik School of Nursing as an assistant professor in August 2024.
Her research projects at UTMB included collecting qualitative data on young gunshot wound patients about their injuries and past exposure to firearms. These findings helped the design of her current quantitative, longitudinal study.
“Firearm injury survivors need to feel safe after being shot, which can fuel desires to own firearms themselves,” she said.
While post-traumatic stress disorder is associated with firearm injuries, little research has been conducted on other sequelae such as mental cognition and maladaptive coping behaviors. DeMello aims to identify such consequences and gain a better understanding of risk and protective factors related to repeat firearm victimization, which can include psychological threats as well as physical wounds. She will also assess survivors’ attitudes toward firearms and their propensity to own, carry, or access them.
“We hypothesize that participants with higher levels of psychosocial distress, lower mental cognition, and more engagement in risky behaviors will have a heightened risk of repeat victimization and a stronger propensity toward owning and using firearms,” DeMello wrote in her proposal. “The cognition piece, which includes executive function and emotion, is extremely important to future well-being and economic mobility. Being shot may set off a trajectory toward more permanent negative life experiences.”
Her team will train nurses in the Level I trauma center at Ben Taub Hospital in Houston, who will help identify more than 1,100 firearm injury survivors between the ages of 15 and 24. The study will collect longitudinal data via mixed methods on youth injured by interpersonal assault.
Longer term, DeMello expects her work to provide a foundation for future research, including a broader longitudinal study. She also sees the potential for developing and testing interventions to reduce repeat victimization and perpetration of gun violence. Her findings may also help health care providers prioritize which firearm injury survivors might most benefit from such interventions.
DeMello’s grant is a K23 Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award. This type of grant provides time and funding for intensive research training that will build a solid foundation for a program of research and additional funding.
Supporting her grant as primary mentor is Jeff R. Temple, PhD, associate dean for clinical research in the School of Behavioral Health Sciences at UTHealth Houston. Shannon Juengst, PhD, CRC, a senior scientist and clinical investigator in the Brain Injury Research Center at TIRR Memorial Hermann, will serve as co-mentor.
Sherri Deatherage Green
