Stroke study wins $20.8 million grant renewal to explore disparities

“One of the great strengths of this study, something that sets it apart, is that we go into the communities and into the homes of study participants to gather the measurements we need, from height and weight to blood pressure readings, prescription names and other details,” said George Howard, Dr.P.H., professor of biostatistics in the School of Public Health and the study’s principal investigator. “Other studies, like the Framingham Heart Study or the Cardiovascular Health Study, ask participants to go into the clinic.”

The in-home aspect of the study allows REGARDS data to be more racially and regionally mixed. In-clinic studies often are limited to one town or one region, and are not representative of the entire U.S. population, said Virginia Howard, Ph.D, another lead investigator on the study and an epidemiologist at UAB.

In-home visits to REGARDS volunteers are contracted out to a national examination company with representatives in almost every corner of the nation, the Howards said. Other techniques like mail and telephone calls are used to stay in close contact with the 30,228 study enrollees all aged 45 and older.

REGARDS already has spawned more than 80 accompanying research reports, including one finding that about half of all people who reported a stroke symptom had failed to see a doctor for those symptoms. Another REGARDS report showed that African-Americans were more likely than whites to recognize high blood pressure and get medical treatment, but African-Americans on average still had higher blood pressure.

The study is a research partnership that includes UAB’s departments of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Preventive Medicine, UAB’s Center for Aging, the University of Vermont in Burlington, the University of Arkansas for Health Sciences in Little Rock, the University of Cincinnati, Indiana University in Indianapolis and the Alabama Neurological Institute in Birmingham.

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