Building Community Capacity for Disability Prevention for Minority Elders COVID-19 supplement
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PROJECT SUMMARY Previous studies have shown that major health crises and economic shocks can have negative impacts on mental health, which are worsened when physical quarantine is required. A particularly vulnerable population are those that have physical and emotional problems and are ethnic/racial and linguistic minority elders, many of whom live in areas with high infection rates and lack of appropriate health resources. The ongoing impact of the crisis on minority elders, who may take longer to recover and require longer periods of quarantine, is essential to understand and address. Our proposed supplement extends from the Positive Minds Strong Bodies clinical trial, that showed positive outcomes for this combined mental health and physical disability management and prevention intervention. We seek to assess the long-term effect of this program in reducing elders’ mortality (Aim 1) and maintaining mental health (Aim 2), as participants have been exposed to COVID- 19 or its social effects. We hypothesize that elders who received the intervention approximately 3 years ago pre-COVID will have a lower trend for mortality than those in the control condition, after adjusting for age, gender, and comorbidities at baseline. Our study is a unique opportunity to address disparities in a multiethnic, multilingual sample, including Latino, Asian and Black participants in 4 languages, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese and English. We propose to test whether the Positive Minds Strong Bodies intervention buffers mental health and disability impacts, through recontact of elders who participated in the 2015-2019 trial, along with those that will be newly enrolled in our new implementation study. In the third aim of the supplement, we will explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on daily stressors for ethnic/racial minority elders, as well as their responses to public health interventions such as home confinement, social distancing and isolation, mass risk communications, disease testing, intention to vaccinate and contact tracing. The proposed supplement will test the potential for this combined intervention to contribute to ongoing preparedness during the COVID-19 pandemic while also providing an evidence-based program that could support a diverse population in the face of future health crises.
