Coronary risk intervention in a county health department setting.

This study set out to develop a model of arteriosclerotic heart disease (ASHD) risk intervention that could be implemented on the local health department level. Accordingly, efforts were made to maintain simplicity and to minimize costs. The study population comprised volunteer participants from two intact governmental agencies in Davis County, Utah. One group was designated as Intervention and the other as the Control Group. The Davis County Health Department was the coordinating agency. All participants received an initial 3-minute ASHD risk assessment test and a similar evaluation six to seven months later as a posttest. The primary effort to lower ASHD risk was a series of risk-specific classes offered during the inter-test period to the intervention group only. When the pre-test data were analyzed, it was discovered that the two groups were dissimilar in major characteristics impacting risk for ASHD. Therefore, it was decided to block the participants by gender during statistical analysis in order to enhance comparability between the comparison groups. For example, intervention groups’ females were compared statistically with control females. The final study population consisted of the following groups: 59 Intervention Females (IF), 33 Control Females (CF), 65 Intervention Males (IM), and 76 Control Males (CM). Even though the participants in the intervention groups experienced a decrease in their risk of ASHD, as measured by risk factor analysis, the control participants also improved in these same categories. This resulted in the absence of any significant changes in the intervention groups except percent body fat where the control improved significantly more that the intervention group! Thus, we were neither able to prove nor disprove the ability of a local health department to impact individual’s risk for ASHD. Local health department should continue to seek way to intervene in the major killers of our time, the degenerative disorders.