What the Jackson Heart Study Has Taught Us About Diabetes and Cardiovascular Disease in the African American Community: a 20-year Appreciation.

Purpose Of Review: The burden of cardiometabolic diseases such as cardiovascular disease (CVD) and type 2 diabetes (T2D) is pronounced among African Americans. Research has shown that behavioral, social, metabolic, psychosocial, and genetic risk factors of CVD and T2D are closely interwoven. Approximately 20 years ago, the Jackson Heart Study (JHS) was established to investigate this constellation of risk factors.

Explaining Poor Medication Adherence among Adults with Type 2 Diabetes in an Urban Community Health Center.

Nonadherence to diabetes medication is a common and costly problem, significantly precluding the evidence-based benefits of diabetes care. Nonadherence is also a poorly understood multifactorial behavior, particularly among African Americans with type 2 diabetes receiving care in under-resourced primary care settings. We investigated several known or suspected individual-level factors influencing diabetes medication adherence among a predominantly African American group of adults with diabetes at a local community health center.

Peer training of community health workers to improve heart health among African American women.

Introduction: Training community health workers (CHWs) builds a workforce that is essential to addressing the chronic disease crisis. This article describes a highly replicable CHW training program that targets heart disease risk among African American women.

Background: African American women suffer disproportionately from heart disease mortality and morbidity.

Using evaluability assessment and evaluation capacity-building to strengthen community-based prevention initiatives.

Objectives: To examine the process of community-campus engagement in an initiative developed to build evaluation capacities of community-based organizations (CBOs).

Methods: Evaluability assessment, capacity-building, self administered surveys and semi-structured interviews were conducted from 2004 to 2007 and analyzed through transcript assessment and SPSS to identify trends, relationships and capacity changes over time.

Results: Evaluability assessment identified CBO strengths in program planning and implementation and challenges in measurable objective development, systematic use of mixed methods, data management and analysis.

Disease management to promote blood pressure control among African Americans.

African Americans have a higher prevalence of hypertension and poorer cardiovascular and renal outcomes than white Americans. The objective of this study was to determine whether a telephonic nurse disease management (DM) program designed for African Americans is more effective than a home monitoring program alone to increase blood pressure (BP) control among African Americans enrolled in a national health plan. A prospective randomized controlled study (March 2006-December 2007) was conducted, with 12 months of follow-up on each subject.

Enhancing community-based organizations' capacity for HIV/AIDS education and prevention.

The catalytic potential of community-based organizations to promote health, prevent disease, and address racial, ethnic, and socio-economic disparities in local communities is well recognized. However, many CBOs, particularly, small- to medium-size organizations, lack the capacity to plan, implement, and evaluate their successes. Moreover, little assistance has been provided to enhance their capacity and the effectiveness of technical assistance to enhance capacity is likewise limited.

Community-based organizations' capacity to plan, implement, and evaluate success.

Community-based organizations (CBOs) have the potential to promote and sustain health, prevent disease, and address health disparities, but many lack the capacity to do so. An assessment of the 20 CBOs receiving supplemental grant funding from the Pfizer Foundation Southern HIV/AIDS Prevention Initiative indicated a high level of knowledge for developing goals and objectives (mean score=3.08 on a scale of 0 (none) to 4 (extensive)) and high self-assessed abilities to conduct six of 20 specific intervention activities, including the development of community relationships and coalitions.

Barriers to prenatal care among Black women of low socioeconomic status.

Objective: To qualitatively identify attitudinal and psychosocial determinants of early prenatal care among Black women of low socioeconomic status (SES).

Methods: Focus group discussions were conducted among Black women who attended community clinics for prenatal care.

Results: Early initiators of prenatal care, compared with late initiators, had positive attitudes toward pregnancy, were knowledgeable about pregnancy signs/symptoms, and thought prenatal care was important.

HIV testing rates among African Americans: why are they not increasing?

HIV/AIDS disproportionately affects the African-American community. It is imperative to increase the awareness of HIV/AIDS as well as the amount of people getting tested. Sometimes strategies to increase testing in the African-American community do not have to do with access but more so with other circumstances surrounding testing.