While snipping or shaving to a hip-hop background beat, California barber Corey Thomas passes out friendly advice to his African-American customers: Watch what you eat, check your blood pressure and don’t take life so hard.
Along with 51 other black-owned, Los Angeles-area barbershops, Thomas, the proprietor of the local barber A New You, took part in an unusual health study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). It targeted non-Hispanic black men, for whom uncontrolled hypertension, or high blood pressure, is a much greater problem than for whites or Latinos.
Hypertension usually causes no symptoms and can lead to heart and kidney damage as well as strokes and heart attacks.
The study was conducted in 2016 by a team of pharmacists together with physicians from several medical centres in Southern California. All of the 319 barbershop customers in the study had hypertension, defined as an average systolic blood pressure (the pressure on the arteries when the heart beats) of 140 mm Hg or higher.
They were randomly assigned to one of two groups. In the intervention group, barbers encouraged meetings with a specially trained pharmacist who visited once a week, prescribed blood pressure medicine under an agreement with the participants’ doctors, dispensed it on the spot and checked to make sure they took it. A blood pressure machine in the barbershop sent the participants’ readings to their doctors and the pharmacist.
In the control group, barbers simply encouraged lifestyle modifications and doctor appointments.
After six months, the systolic blood pressure in the intervention group had fallen by 27.0 mm Hg (to 125.8 mm Hg) on average, compared with 9.3 mm Hg (to 145.4 mm Hg) in the control group. Some 90 per cent of the intervention group lowered their pressure to under 140 mm Hg, compared with about a third of the control group.
The “non-traditional health care setting” was chosen for the study because many blacks are mistrustful of the medical system and barbershops are a traditional meeting place in black neighbourhoods, one of the researchers was quoted as saying.
In principle, a similar “low-threshold” programme is conceivable and would be useful in other countries, says Dr Joachim Hoyer, director of the nephrology department at the University Hospital of Giessen and Marburg. Low-threshold treatment programmes offer easy access to services while making few or no demands on patients.
“There are people […] who don’t realize they have high blood pressure and seldom see their GP,” Hoyer says. In a country like Germany, as many as 50 per cent of those affected don’t take medications as they should, despite attempts being made to reach them via pharmacies, popular health magazines and GPs, says Dr Bernhard Kraemer, president of the German Hypertension League.
As for tips to steer clear of high blood pressure, Kraemer says “excessive salt consumption should definitely be avoided. Also helpful are weight loss, a diet rich in fruit, vegetables and low-fat dairy products, and endurance training.
dpa
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