Supporting Tailored Adaptive Change and Reinforcement for Medication Adherence Program (STAR-MAP): Randomized trial of a novel approach to improve adherence in older hypertensive women and men

Project summary There is a fundamental gap in the availability of interventions that 1) sustainably improve adherence to pre- scribed blood pressure (BP) medications, 2) identify underlying behavior change mechanisms, and 3) demon- strate efficacy by sex and race in older adults. Accordingly, interventions to improve adherence and BP control

remain minimally effective. The long-term goal is to improve medication adherence, BP control, and healthy aging in older hypertensive adults. The overall objective for this R01 application is to determine the efficacy of the Supporting Tailored Adaptive change and Reinforcement for Medication Adherence Program (STAR-

MAP), which integrates the transformative Overcoming Immunity-to-Change (OITC) health coaching process, on improving adherence, BP control, and quality of life (QOL). The OITC approach that has proven useful in other arenas was successfully applied to BP management in the research team's recent pilot study. Based on

this prior work, the central hypothesis is that STAR-MAP, designed to help nonadherent older hypertensive adults to identify and alter implicit attitudes that hinder medication adherence, will change mindsets and im- prove daily taking of prescribed medications, leading to lowered BP and better QOL. The rationale for the pro-

posed study is that demonstration of the efficacy of STAR-MAP would provide new opportunities to overturn nonadherent behavior and improve BP control and healthy aging for the growing population of older adults with hypertension, overall and in sex and race subgroups. The central hypothesis will be tested by pursuing two

specific aims: (1) Determine the efficacy, underlying mechanism, and sustainability of the STAR-MAP interven- tion, aimed at improving medication-taking behavior, on medication adherence and clinical outcomes; and (2) Explore the efficacy of STAR-MAP in sex and race subgroups. Under the first aim, a randomized controlled

trial will be conducted in 402 nonadherent (proportion of days covered (PDC)