Grant: Operating Grant

At present, appropriate statistical methods do not exist to explore potential risk factors for chronic disease in the Our Health Counts study of Canada's urban Aboriginal community. As such, expanding on prior research documenting health disparity in this study cannot be done. The Our Health Counts project used a new and highly advanced method to recruit First Nations participants, called Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS). This approach involved giving coupons to study participants who would then recruit other First Nations community members. These newly recruited people were then provided with coupons to recruit others until a total of 554 adults were recruited into the study. This approach provided important health disparity information, including findings such as the proportion of First Nations who are diabetic (16 % vs. 5 % in the general population), have high blood pressure (26 % vs. 20%) and have been diagnosed with heart disease (8 % vs. 3 %). Typically, these analyses would represent the starting point for more research to explore potential causes that might be related to these diseases. However, in the context of RDS studies, appropriate statistical methods to do this have not yet been developed. Given the current limitations in our ability to analyze this data and to further understand health disparity in Aboriginal communities, we have two main goals: 1. To develop new statistical methods which are appropriate for this new, RDS data type; and 2. To apply these statistical methods to examine diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. That is, we want to learn which physical, social and environmental factors may be linked to being diagnosed with these chronic conditions. While we have shown large disparities between the health of urban Aboriginal people and the general population, the development and application of these new statistical methods will paint a more complete picture of which factors affect Aboriginal health.