News Release

Counseling can help lower blood pressure

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Center for Advancing Health

Counseling programs can help people control their blood pressure according to a new analysis of studies on behavioral strategies that can be used in conjunction with medication.

“This study provides substantive evidence that behavioral interventions can play an important role in improving blood pressure management,” says lead author L. Ebony Boulware, M.D., of the department of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

More than 43 million Americans have high blood pressure, or hypertension. While medications are often used to treat this disorder, fewer than one-third of people with hypertension are able to bring their blood pressure down to a healthy level.

Many doctors support the idea that counseling and other behavioral interventions are valuable in lowering blood pressure, but few studies have determined if this is the case, according to Boulware’s analysis in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Boulware and her colleagues reviewed 232 medical articles published over the past 30 years that addressed behavioral strategies to combat hypertension.

They focused on 15 studies that dealt with the impact of counseling programs, self-monitoring of blood pressure and training courses.

Altogether these studies involved more than 4,000 people who, in most cases, also were on hypertension medication. Programs studied varied greatly, with interventions lasting from five to 90 minutes, while the frequency ranged from every two weeks to every three months.

“Counseling offered significant blood pressure improvement over usual care in four comparison studies,” says Boulware.

In addition, studies showed people who participated in training programs had better control over their hypertension than people who did not, and a combination of training and counseling seemed to be the most effective.

Too few studies have been done to determine whether patients self-monitoring has long-term effects in improving blood pressure, according to Boulware.

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The study was supported in part by a research training award from the Health Resources and Service Administration.

The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, sponsored by the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine and the American College of Preventive Medicine, is published eight times a year by Elsevier Science. The Journal is a forum for the communication of information, knowledge and wisdom in prevention science, education, practice and policy.

For more information about the Journal, contact the editorial office at 619-594-7344. Posted by the Center for the Advancement of Health http://www.cfah.org. For more research news and information, go to our special section devoted to health and behavior in the “Peer-Reviewed Journals” area of Eurekalert!, http://www.eurekalert.org/restricted/reporters/journals/cfah/.

For information about the Center, call Ira Allen, iallen@cfah.org, 202-387-2829.


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