Lifestyle Coaching Helps Black Patients Lower Their Blood Pressure
Giving Black patients with hypertension personalized coaching on how to improve their eating habits made it easier for them to manage their blood pressure, a new study has found.“Black adults have the highest rates of high blood pressure in the United States, and, for reasons we don’t fully understand, it starts at a younger age and results in strokes, heart attacks, heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and other serious hypertension-related health problems occurring at an earlier age as well,” says the senior study author, Stephen Sidney, MD, MPH, a research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California.The new study focused on a particularly high risk group of 1,761 Black patients — people whose blood pressure remained high even when they took medication to lower it. All patients…