Tailored Telephone Counseling Health messages can be generic, targeted to subsets of the population or tailored for individual recipients. Tailored messages incorporate sociocul-tural and psychological factors that have been shown to increase compliance with health behavioral objectives and they have been examined in a variety of ways. Respondents who completed the community-based survey and agreed [...]

The study was conducted over a four-year period between 1996 and 2000. Participants were recruited using Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) software and the random-digit-dialing (RDD) method during 1997 and 1998. An independent firm conducted the community-based RDD survey using methods previously described. Study eligibility criteria included living in the King/Drew Medical Center service area, [...]

INTRODUCTION The 2002 Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer states that overall cancer incidence rates stabilized, while overall cancer mortality rates decreased for both men and women between 1973 and 1999. The report utilized the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program and other databases to calculate the trends. The report [...]

To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the prevalence of low bone density in African-American patients with RA (including patients with either early or established disease). Depending on the race/ethnicity of the reference population used, we found that approximately one-third to half of patients were osteopenic or worse, and 5-16% were osteoporotic [...]

Patient Characteristics Characteristics of the 175 study participants are summarized in Table 2. Study participants had a mean age of 51 ± 13 years and were predominantly women (n=144, 82%). Patients had a mean RA disease duration of 14 ± 7 months and a substantial majority of participants (n=145, 83%) had received prior treatment with [...]

Patients Participants were enrollees in the Consortium for the Longitudinal Evaluation of African Americans with Early Rheumatoid Arthritis (CLEAR). Eligible participants self-reported African-American ethnicity, had an established diagnosis of RA as defined by the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) classification criteria and had <2 years of disease duration (from time of symptom onset). All patients [...]

INTRODUCTION Osteoporosis (Generic Fosamax is taken for the prevention or treatment of osteoporosis) is increasingly recognized to represent a major source of morbidity for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Although the availability of dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) represents a major advance in osteoporosis care in the context of RA, fracture risk assessment in non-Caucasians [...]