Barbershops a cut above for BP checks in African American men
OCTOBER 28, 2010 |Chicago, IL - In the Texas of 150 years ago, the town barber was probably also the guy who pulled an aching tooth. A cadre of barbers in today's Texas were true to their healthcare-provider heritage by participating in a hypertension-screening outreach experiment that helped many of their customers with hypertension to get their blood pressures under control.
In a unique randomized trial [1], African American men who were patrons of black-owned barbershops in Dallas County, where they had their BP regularly measured and were encouraged to contact a physician when it was elevated, showed a mean 7.8-mm-Hg drop in systolic pressure over 10 months.
That was only 2.5-mm-Hg more of a drop (p=0.08) than seen in a comparator group of men who had received standard educational pamphlets on high BP in African Americans, but no BP checks or other encouragement to assess blood pressure, at the barbershops.
"That doesn't sound like much of a blood-pressure fall for any one person, but at the population level it's a very large effect," lead author Dr Ronald G Victor (Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, Los Angeles, CA) observed for heartwire.
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