Search

Examines women's perceived and partners' reported social support for smoking cessation during pregnancy. Comparison between the mean levels of the women's and partners' perceptions of support; Need for further examination of couples' perceptions of support; Relationship between women's own smoking status and perceptions of support.

The article discusses the specific issues and approaches which were the focus of community-based health promotion program evaluation efforts in the cardiovascular disease community research and demonstration studies. The studies that were conducted included Stanford Five-City Project, Minnesota Heart Health Program, Pawtucket Heart Health Program, and the German Cardiovascular Prevention Project. A few lessons were learned from the studies. The first lesson is the importance of monitoring the dose of intervention, both in the intervention and in the comparison communities. A second major lesson is that these community-based programs are not occurring in a vacuum. Thirdly, there was the need to simultaneously monitor changes at various levels of the community.

The Minnesota Heart Health Program was a community trial of cardiovascular disease prevention methods that was conducted from 1980 to 1990 in three Upper Midwestern communities with three matched comparison communities. A 5- to 6-year intervention program used community-wide and individual health education in an attempt to decrease population risk. A major hypothesis was that the incidence of validated fatal and nonfatal coronary heart disease and stroke in 30- to 74-year-old men and women would decline differentially in the education communities after the health promotion program was introduced. This hypothesis was investigated using mixed-model regression. The intervention effect was modeled as a series of annual departures from a linear secular trend after a 2-year lag from the start of the intervention program. In the education communities, 2, 394 cases of coronary heart disease and 818 cases of stroke occurred, with 2, 526 and 739 cases, respectively, being seen in the comparison communities. The overall decline in coronary heart disease incidence was 1.8 percent per year in men (p = 0.03) and 3.6 percent per year in women (p = 0.007). For stroke, there were no significant secular trends. The authors recently published findings showing minimal effects of sustained intervention on risk factor levels. In the current report, there was no evidence of a significant intervention effect on morbidity or mortality, either for coronary heart disease or for stroke. Am J Epidemiol 1996; 144: 351–62. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]