FRIDAY, Oct. 12, 2018 (HealthDay News) — A culturally tailored, skills-based educational intervention did not reduce systolic blood pressure at one year after stroke/transient ischemic attack, according to a study published online Oct. 8 in JAMA Neurology.
Bernadette Boden-Albala, Dr.P.H., M.P.H., from New York University in New York City, and colleagues performed a randomized clinical trial to examine the efficacy of a culturally tailored skills-based educational intervention with telephone follow-up versus standard discharge care for a multiethnic cohort of 552 patients with mild/moderate stroke/transient ischemic attack.
The researchers found no significant difference in systolic blood pressure reduction between the intervention and usual care groups at one-year follow-up (β = 2.5 mm Hg; 95 percent confidence interval, −1.9 to 6.9). Among Hispanic individuals, the intervention arm had a clinically and statistically significantly greater reduction of 9.9 mm Hg in mean systolic blood pressure versus usual care (95 percent confidence interval, 1.8 to 18 mm Hg), although the analysis was not powered for subgroup analysis. No significant differences were seen between the arms for non-Hispanic white (β = 3.3 mm Hg; 95 percent confidence interval, −4.1 to 10.7) and non-Hispanic black participants (β = −1.6 mm Hg; 95 percent confidence interval, −10.1 to 6.8).
“Culturally tailored, skills-based strategies may be an important alternative to knowledge-focused approaches in achieving sustained vascular risk reduction and addressing racial/ethnic stroke disparities; however, these findings should be tested in future studies,” the authors write.
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