Updated AHA guide targets CVD, stroke prevention on local level

In the struggle to fight heart disease and stroke, health providers and policymakers have a new tool for helping those at the community level.

Updated from 2003, the American Heart Association has released 2013 evidence-based goals, strategies and recommendations for community-based public health interventions in Circulation.

“The future burden of CVD, unless we can prevent it, is projected to have an enormous economic impact,” Thomas A. Pearson, MD, senior associate dean for clinical research at University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in Rochester, N.Y., said in a press release. “Public health goals should focus on developing interventions that help make an individual’s default decisions healthy.”

The new guide lists programs that illustrate best practices at national, regional and local levels and focuses on:

Reducing or eliminating tobacco use, increasing physical activity, maintaining a healthy weight and improving dietary habits;
Encouraging awareness of risk factors for hyperlipidemia, hypertension, diabetes and adhering to treatment;
Targeting locations and environments that best impact health (work sites, religious organizations, schools); and
Specifying the type of intervention (media, organizational partnerships and policy change that will impact health).

“The social and environmental origins of heart disease and stroke are well established, and enhanced population-based prevention programs could lead to a large decline in CVD morbidity and mortality,” the authors wrote. “The approaches to reducing CVD burden are also becoming increasingly clear: encouraging optimal health behaviors through public health interventions in community settings where people live, work, worship, study and play. … Through primordial prevention, we can avert the continuing progression of CVD risk in each generation, which continues to demand remedial strategies that are too costly, too limited and often too late.”

For more information:

Pearson TA. Circulation. 2013;doi:10.1161/CIR.0b013e31828f8a94.

Disclosure: See the full study for a list of the researchers’ relevant financial disclosures.