Assessment of Mortality and Smoking Rates Before and After Reduction in Community-wide Prevention Programs in Rural Maine.

Importance: It is unclear whether effective population-wide interventions that reduce risk factors and improve health result in sustained benefits to a community's health. If benefits do persist after a program is ended, interventions could be brief rather than maintained long term.

Objective: To measure mortality and smoking rates in a rural community over decades before, during, and after prevention program reductions.

Community-wide cardiovascular disease prevention programs and health outcomes in a rural county, 1970-2010.

Importance: Few comprehensive cardiovascular risk reduction programs, particularly those in rural, low-income communities, have sustained community-wide interventions for more than 10 years and demonstrated the effect of risk factor improvements on reductions in morbidity and mortality.

Objective: To document health outcomes associated with an integrated, comprehensive cardiovascular risk reduction program in Franklin County, Maine, a low-income rural community.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Forty-year observational study involving residents of Franklin County, Maine, a rural, low-income population of 22,444 in 1970, that used the preceding decade as a baseline and compared Franklin County with other Maine counties and state averages.

Cardiac rehabilitation with nurse care management and telephonic interactions at a community hospital: program evaluation of participation and lipid outcomes.

Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) can help patients with heart disease control some risk factors, limit new coronary artery lesions, and decrease death rates. However, participation rates in CR are low. Using a descriptive design, we evaluated a modified CR program in which nurse care managers used telephonic communication with patients in their homes by comparing it to a traditional CR program in a hospital setting.