Implementing and Testing a Culturally-Tailored Stroke Risk Factor Reduction Intervention in Community Senior Centers

Detailed 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.

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Interventions