CIHR-funded projects
Summary:
There is insufficient infrastructure in Africa to allow for a rapid of expansion of hypertension awareness, screening and treatment. However, using the infrastructure and lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS epidemic represents an important opportunity to strengthen local health systems by focusing on screening, supply chain management, and treatment and retention in care. Our Team Grant involves country leaders in hypertension from South Africa, Uganda and Rwanda, as well as HIV/AIDS leaders from these countries to create a network of excellence at strengthening the response to both communicable and non-communicable diseases. Our proposed studies involve screening campaigns, modeling the health system requirements of a successful supply-chain, a factorial randomized evaluation of interventions to promote adherence to drugs and retention in care, all in a locally relevant manner that can be scaled up at a sustainable country level. Finally, we aim to build capacity by providing accredited education in supply-chain management.
Summary:
Hypertension affects one billion people and is the commonest cause of death globally. Despite clear evidence of the benefits of BP lowering for over 2 decades, its detection, treatment and control are poor in most countries resulting in a large number of avoidable deaths, heart attacks and strokes. We therefore need a fundamentally new approach to tackling this problem. We therefore propose to develop a model programme to control hypertension in Colombia and Malaysia that involves a contextually relevant multipronged intervention strategy that involves multiple sectors (health, professional societies, governments, regulators, business and legal) that overcomes the barriers, tests the effectiveness and costs of an integrated and innovative model pilot programme, and then evaluates it. If successful, the programme can be scaled up and form the basis of national efforts to control hypertension and prevent deaths, heart attacks and strokes in several countries around the world.
Summary:
Heart disease and stroke are the number one killers world-wide. When someone has hypertension, the constantly elevated blood pressure damages their blood vessels and the organs that they supply blood to. This causes stroke, heart attack, heart failure, kidney failure and dementia. Finding and lowering high blood pressure to normal with lifestyle changes and if necessary medications, lowers the risk of these outcomes. Canada has high rates of blood pressure control compared to other countries in the world, due in large part to the successful dissemination of hypertension guidelines. However remote and disadvantaged communities have not been as successful and need additional measures to help achieve the same level of blood pressure control as the rest of the country. The DREAM-GLOBAL team has extensive experience with project management and cell phone technology as well as working with Canada's Aboriginal Communities and a large community in Tanzania. The DREAM-GLOBAL project will integrate innovations in technology with the implementation of guidelines-based blood pressure control and through partnerships with experts in government and industry, overcome barriers to lowering blood pressure in Canada's Aboriginal Communities, and in a community in Tanzania. We will develop and test tools that will close the circle of care around people with hypertension by bringing measurement data to the medical record and health care provider and also sending useful medical feedback to the person with hypertension via secure data servers and routine SMS messaging on cell phones. We will test the effectiveness of this system for diagnosing and also for managing hypertension. To begin the process of preventing hypertension we will explore with Aboriginal Communities how to create policies to reduce the sodium content in their food. We have a track record of success in managing hypertension and believe that DREAM-GLOBAL can also become a platform for managing other chronic diseases.
- Approval pending. Final approval of grant nominee institutions, principal investigators and funding amounts will occur at the conclusion of grant agreement negotiations with funding partners.