Churches join cardiovascular study of health disparities

By Christine Bordelon
Clarion Herald

All Saints Church, St. Maria Goretti, St. Raymond-St. Leo the Great, St. David, St. Peter Claver and St. Paul the Apostle in New Orleans are participating in Tulane University School of Public Health’s CHERISH (Church-based Health Intervention to Eliminate Racial Inequalities in Cardiovascular Health) study to reduce heart attacks and strokes.

The study, slated to begin in September 2023, is funded by an $8.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).


“Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and it’s even higher in the south and in African Americans,” said Jodie Laurent, senior research coordinator with CHERISH. “This study will inform the policy and practice of future programs that may be implemented in the city (and nationwide) to see what works to improve cardiovascular diseases in the African-American community.”

Laurent said members of participating churches – researchers are seeking a target of 42 of different denominations – receive education, health and lifestyle coaching focused on healthy eating, exercise, weight loss, improving cholesterol and high blood pressure and other risk factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease.

CHERISH will collect data from 25 individuals ages 40 and older at each church and gauge their progress at six, 12 and 18 months and then again six months after the program ends. Half of the churches will comprise a control group that will receive health information and attend group health sessions, while the other half will have intensive intervention, receiving health coaching, diet counseling, advice on medication adherence and health-care coordination. The groups will be selected randomly.

“Everybody will get the same resources, but leaders will be identified in the intervention group in a parish and will be trained (by Tulane) as a community health worker (to provide more support) at that specific parish,” Laurent said.   

Parishes participating
Since the study is in the second of three years of a planning phase, Laurent said CHERISH representatives are working with participating parishes to develop relationships by supporting health events and developing best ways to be effective in each community.

Laurent attended All Saints Church in Algiers’ health fair May 15. All Saints has held a health fair for many years because its former pastor, Josephite Father Peter Weiss, noticed they were losing too many parishioners due to poor health.

“He wanted us to be a healthy parish,” said Elsie Cobb-Wright, leader of the parish’s health and wellness ministry, who organized the first parish health fair around 2015 and conducts approximately four events a year.

Cobb-Wright said she found a Tulane University survey on faith-based, African-American communities and had parishioners participate by assessing what health services they desired, such as diabetes screenings, prostate information, cancer and coronary heart disease. And the partnership began. She’s anticipating more events with the study over the next few years.

In addition to Laurent, Tulane School of Medicine medical students Jonathan Allotey and Crystal Casado, who formed Brothers Linked Against Cancer with medical student Marcus Moses, were also on hand May 15 along with St. Thomas Health Center and a retired dietician who happens to be an All Saints parishioner. Allotey and Casado distributed pamphlets on prostate cancer and emphasized the treatable nature of this cancer if caught early. CHERISH supports community education on all diseases.

“We know there is a huge disparity when it comes to prostate cancer in black men,” Allotey said. “As medical students, we wanted to address this through educating men, since we know men don’t treat this illness. We created this to educate men in culturally safe spaces like churches.”

First-time health fair visitor Arthur Cleveland, a father of four children, learned he had elevated blood pressure at the fair.

“I need to call my primary care physician to get my blood pressure checked,” he said. “It’s been a while since I had a physical and been to a doctor, so this was a prime opportunity to have things checked. Most black folks won’t go to the doctor until it’s too late. So, for the church to do this is excellent.”


Grant helps fund study
Dr. Keith Ferdinand, the Gerald S. Berenson Endowed Chair in preventive cardiology at Tulane’s School of Medicine, is a national leader in community-based research for cardiovascular disease and is one of the principal investigators of the seven-year study. He is being assisted by Dr. Jiang He, the Joseph S. Copes Chair and professor of epidemiology and director of Tulane University Translational Science Institute, and others.

Ferdinand said the CHERISH study is part of the NIH’s “Coordinated Interventions to Prevent and Control Heart and Lung Disease Risk Alliance.” While NIH has conducted smaller community intervention studies, CHERISH is the largest with the greatest number of congregations involved, he said.

“New Orleans is known as a place of great beauty, rich food and wonderful music, but it is also part of what the NIH calls the ‘Stroke Belt’ because of the high risk of heart attacks and strokes in this area. It also has high risks of diabetes and chronic kidney disease. Most of these conditions are higher in the African-American population, and this leads to an increase in premature heart attacks and strokes.”

The CHERISH study aims to determine how best to control the contributors to heart disease – the leading cause of death in the United States that causes a disproportionate life loss in the African-American population, he said.

“The idea is to choose religious congregations and, through a combination of teaching classes, exercise and health information, try to bend the curve of this high degree of heart disease and stroke in the area,” he said. “The institute (NIH), is interested in seeing if we could develop methods to improve that outcome.”

Ferdinand anticipates that the protocols and beneficial outcomes developed in the study will be utilized in other populations across the U.S. to decrease death and disabilities from heart attacks and strokes.

For details on the CHERISH study, go to tulanectsi.org, visit Facebook LAcherishstudy or email [email protected].

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