Use of Herbs and Dietary Supplements in Four Ethnicities

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although prevalence of complementary and alternative (CAM) utilization in the United States has been gaining greater attention over the past ten years, there is little information on its use in minority populations. We propose to analyze data already collected in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute sponsored study of 6,814 adults between the ages of 45-84 of White, African- American, Hispanic and Chinese ethnicity, to evaluate use of ingested CAM substances. We propose to utilize data collected during the MESA baseline examination, collected in 2001-2, to evaluate use of herbal medicine and dietary supplements and to investigate cross-sectional associations between use of these forms of CAM with other characteristics of study participants. Specifically, we propose to answer the following questions: 1) What is the prevalence of herbal medicine, botanical, and dietary supplement use by ethnicity in MESA? 2) Are there differences overall and within ethnicity in herbal, botanical or dietary supplement use by other demographic characteristics including age, gender, marital status, education, income and neighborhood? 3) Are there differences in herbal medicine, botanical and dietary supplement use by serf-reported measures of health such as serf-perceived general health, self-reported medical history, health behaviors, and physical function? 4) Is use of herbal, botanical and dietary supplements related to specific clinical conditions in middle-age and older adults, overall and within ethnicity, including hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease, atherosclerosis, arthritis, or other comorbidities? 5) Are herbal medicine and dietary supplements taken as an alternative to or complementary to other conventional medications for specific comorbidities within specific ethnic groups? Data from the MESA baseline Medications form and the baseline Diet Assessment will be used to identify herbs, vitamins, botanicals, and other dietary supplements taken by participants. We will code, clean, and merge the data with other variables of interest already available, and use descriptive statistics and logistic regression to meet study objectives. In additional to allowing cross-sectional analyses to be done within the scope of this project, documentation of herbal and other dietary supplement use will allow for subsequent evaluation of patterns of use over time and ultimate analyses of events once these have been collected during the seven years of follow-up planned for this cohort. It may also be possible to test associations of specific herb/supplement use with specific clinical/subclinical conditions should adequate power be available.