Improving Cardiovascular Health Among African-Americans Through Mobile Health: the FAITH! App Pilot Study

Excerpt

African-Americans (AAs) have 82% lower odds than whites of meeting five or more ideal cardiovascular (CV) health components comprising the American Heart Association (AHA) Life’s Simple 7 (LS7), an evidence-based metric of seven health-promoting behaviors and biologic factors that, at ideal levels, improve CV outcomes (diet, physical activity [PA], cigarette smoking, body mass index [BMI], blood pressure [BP], total cholesterol, fasting glucose).¹ Mobile health (mHealth) interventions are promising for promoting CV health within this population.² Culturally relevant health interventions delivered through community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches have proven successful in substantially impacting specific CV risk factors (e.g., hypertension) in AAs.³ However, to our knowledge, our study is the first mHealth intervention targeting multiple risk factors by promoting ideal CV health (LS7) for AAs. We hypothesized that an evidence-based, theory-informed, culturally relevant, community-based mHealth lifestyle intervention would improve CV health among AA adults. …