Education Can Cut Rate of Illness, Study Finds

Local health education programs costing a couple of dollars per person each year can reduce rates of high blood pressure, smoking and blood cholesterol significantly, Stanford University doctors said Tuesday.

A research team that studied the effects of a five-year health-consciousness media blitz in Monterey and Salinas said slick TV spots, gimmicky contests and newspaper columns touting the benefits of exercise and a controlled diet can persuade people to practice more healthful habits.

“We have seen in this study that there are ways to lower an entire community’s risk of heart disease,” said Robert Melton, director of the Monterey County Health Department and a coordinator of the $2-million education campaign. “Heart disease is difficult to fight because it is tied to personal behavior.”

Now that the Stanford team has developed the educational materials and proven that they can get the message across, communities across the country can use the findings to fight heart disease and other health problems, said a federal health official who joined the researchers in announcing the study’s results.

“I look at this project as a turning point. We now have a model that works,” said William Harlan of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

The $15-million program, which included monitoring the health of 600 people, was funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and conducted by the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention. The results are published in today’s Journal of the American Medical Assn.

From 1980 to 1986, Stanford researchers and Monterey health officials bombarded 120,000 residents in Monterey and Salinas with health campaigns, hitting adults with an average of two messages a week at a cost of about $2.65 per person annually.

The blitz included TV ads, Spanish-language radio spots, brochures sent through direct mail and distributed at business offices, school programs and a newspaper column written by one of the doctors conducting the study.

Doctors monitored risk factors there and in Modesto and San Luis Obispo, two cities without any similar programs.

In Monterey and Salinas, the communitywide smoking rate fell 24%, while only 9% of the smokers quit in the other cities, said John Farquhar, chief researcher on the project and director of the Stanford program conducting the study. Blood cholesterol, blood pressure and resting pulse rate dropped as much as 4%.

If those levels remain unchanged, heart disease and strokes should kill about 15% fewer people than usual in those communities, scientists estimate.