Culturally Tailoring a Stroke Intervention in Community Senior Centers

Summary

Stroke is a cruel disease that disproportionately kills and disables African-Americans, Latinos, Chinese-Americans and Korean-Americans; seniors with high blood pressure are at particularly high risk. There is a higher incidence of hemorrhagic stroke in African Americans, Latinos, and Chinese Americans relative to non-Latino whites. Asian-Americans have up to 1.4 higher relative risk of stroke death compared to U.S. non-Latino whites. A critical need therefore exists for a sustainable and scalable mechanism to disseminate culturally-tailored stroke knowledge/prevention education in community-based settings where large numbers of these high-risk ethnic minority older adult groups are regularly served, such as in federally funded Multipurpose Senior Centers (MPCs) that exist across the nation (16 of which are in Los Angeles alone).

The overall objective of the proposed study is to develop and test the implementation of a training program for case managers at senior centers to implement a stoke knowledge/prevention education program among four high-risk ethnic minority older adult groups--Korean-American, Chinese-American, African-American, Latinos. We propose to develop a culturally-tailored case manager training curriculum, implement the training at 4 community-based sites, and evaluate the training model using a randomized wait-list controlled trial (n=244) testing the hypothesis that training case managers will decrease older adult participants' stroke risk in a sustainable fashion through increasing their preventative behavior (i.e. increasing their physical activity--mean steps/day--at 1 and 3 months).

Findings will inform similar community-academic partnership efforts around stroke and other disease-specific prevention research/interventions; they will also determine next steps in terms of whether this case manager-centric model can be scaled up and deployed in other community-based settings.

Conditions

• Hypertension
• Stroke
• Sedentary Lifestyle
• Aged
• Minority Groups

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Walking Intervention

4-week series of twice-weekly 1-hour group-based case-manager-led interactive sessions. The intervention will provide the knowledge necessary to improve stroke risk factors. Case manager group leaders will teach that seeing a healthcare provider regularly and monitoring blood pressure prevents strokes; all participants will be provided with the National Institute on Aging booklet, "How to Talk to your Doctor" and the contact information for their healthcare provider. Participants will be given a pedometer and be trained to use it to measure steps, with the goal of reaching 10,000 steps each day. The intervention will utilize attribution retraining to teach seniors that stroke risk factors including sedentary lifestyle should not be attributed to "old age."

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of California, Los Angeles

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Catherine A Sarkisian, MD, MSPH · University of California, Los Angeles

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

60 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2014-10-31

Primary Completion

2016-08-31

Completion

2018-01-31

Countries

• United States

Study Locations