Briana Sprague
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Heart and blood vessel disease, known as cardiovascular disease, has declined across the U.S. population, but it still falls hardest on Black adults.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
hypertension
high blood pressure
cardiovascular disease
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2030
What they work on
- Collect primary data from Black adults receiving care at federally qualified health centers to learn their preferences and needs for managing stress.
- Use user-centered design to iteratively prototype a stress management program with Black adults, drawing on research about community-level factors that protect against stress and its cardiovascular effects.
- Run a Stage 1b feasibility pilot of the program in Black adults with stress and elevated blood pressure, measuring feasibility, perceived stress and ambulatory blood pressure from a portable monitor at baseline and posttest.
More about the research
One reason may be stress: Black adults report more exposure to stressors, and chronic stress can raise blood pressure and harm heart health. The American Heart Association has called for programs that reduce stressors and improve how people respond to stress. Few such programs have been built with the patients they are meant to serve.
Why it matters
Black adults carry a higher burden of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, and existing programs focus mainly on traditional risk factors such as diet and exercise. A stress management program that patients help design could be more engaging and sustainable. Such a program could fit into community health centers and could help lower blood pressure and narrow heart-health disparities, which a planned future trial would test.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Devin Mann
New York University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop community health worker training modules for remote blood pressure monitoring, plus electronic health record support tools, using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research and user-centered design.
Matthew Hickey
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Identify patient-level barriers to taking blood pressure medication within an integrated HIV–hypertension care model in rural Kenya, using theory-informed mixed methods within the SEARCH SAPPHIRE trial.
Sarah Woods
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test in a randomized controlled trial whether Walk Together, four dyadic patient-plus-family sessions over eight weeks, improves hypertension self-management adherence and blood pressure control more than a hypertension education control.
The school
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis: 25 labs on PI Pages, $89M a year on research, 120 research doctorates a year.
More about Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis
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