On this last day of Cholesterol Education Month, the American Heart Association is highlighting the importance of knowing your cholesterol numbers - especially your LDL, or bad cholesterol.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Texas is one of 11 states with the highest cholesterol numbers in the nation.

Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine Cardiologist and Cardiovascular Epidemiologist, Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, said a medical professional can determine your cholesterol level through a blood test.

"You can't feel your cholesterol level," said Lloyd-Jones. "There's only one way to know and that is to directly measure it with a blood test. And so it is one of those things that is truly silent and unless you actively pursue measuring it you'll never know. It's not something you can see or taste or smell."

High cholesterol can be hereditary. Some cases can be controlled through diet and exercise.

High cholesterol can be caused by a poor diet, lack of exercise, and smoking.

LDL, or bad cholesterol, transports cholesterol particles throughout your body that build up in the walls of your arteries - making them hard and narrow, increasing your chances of heart attack or stroke.

Lloyd-Jones, a past president of the American Heart Association, said your overall health also impacts how cholesterol affects you.

"For one person we might say 'well, for now an LDL cholesterol of 140 is fine for you, but were going to monitor that and you know make sure that it doesn't go up,'" said Lloyd-Jones. "But for another person who already has cardiovascular disease or who has diabetes, 140 is way too high."

Exercise helps boost your body's HDL, or the good cholesterol. Foods that can lower your bad cholesterol include beans, nuts, and whole grains.

More new babies are born in the fall than any other time of year which also means some people who give birth may be heading into the winter months with what is sometimes called the "baby blues."

Experts said postpartum depression is more than just the fatigue and life changes that come with being a new parent. In California and across the country, there are more treatment options, including a relatively new, fast-acting pill for severe postpartum depression, called Zurzuvae.

Dr. Donna O'Shea, OB/GYN and chief medical officer for population health at UnitedHealthcare, advised women who feel they are struggling to seek help rather than trying to go it alone.

"One in five women experience pregnancy-related mental health conditions," O'Shea pointed out. "Of women who have postpartum depression, 20% will face suicidal thoughts and even attempt self-harm."

She noted people have a higher risk of postpartum depression if they have a history of anxiety or depression, if they come from an under-resourced community, use drugs or alcohol or if they experience fertility challenges, an unwanted pregnancy or a difficult birth.

Rhonda Smith, executive director of the nonprofit California Black Health Network, said equity issues are also at play here.

"Only about 4% of mental health providers are Black," Smith stressed. "Trying to find a mental health service provider who looks like us, that is very, very difficult."

Women are also urged to contact their doctors, activate their personal support network and find out if their company offers an employee assistance program including mental health resources.

By Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez for KFF Health News.
Broadcast version by Roz Brown for New Mexico News Connection reporting for the KFF Health News-Public News Service Collaboration

It’s not easy to make public health decisions without access to good data. And epidemiologists and public health workers for Native American communities say they’re often in the dark because state and federal agencies restrict their access to the latest numbers.

The 2010 reauthorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act gave tribal epidemiology centers public health authority and requires the federal Department of Health and Human Services to grant them access to and use of data and other protected health information that’s regularly distributed to state and local officials. But tribal epidemiology center workers have told government investigators that’s not often the case.

By July 2020, American Indians and Alaskan Natives had a covid-19 infection rate 3½ times that of non-Hispanic whites. Problems accessing data predated the pandemic, but the alarming infection and death rates in Native American communities underscored the importance of making data-sharing easier so tribal health leaders and epidemiologists have the information they need to make lifesaving decisions.

Tribal health officials have repeatedly said data denials impeded their responses to disease outbreaks, including slowing contact tracing during the pandemic and an ongoing syphilis outbreak in the Midwest and Southwest.

“We’re being blinded,” said Meghan Curry O’Connell, the chief public health officer for the Great Plains Tribal Leaders’ Health Board and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. The sharing of data has improved somewhat in recent years, she said, but not enough.

Federal investigators and tribal epidemiologists have documented a litany of obstacles keeping state and federal public health information from tribes, including confusion about data-sharing policies, inconsistent processes for requesting information, data that’s of poor quality or outdated, and strict privacy rules for sensitive data on health issues like HIV and substance misuse.

Limiting the ability of tribes and tribal epidemiology centers to monitor and respond to public health issues makes historical health disparities difficult to address. Life expectancy among American Indians and Alaskan Natives is at least 5½ years shorter than the national average.

Sarah Shewbrooks and her colleagues at the Great Plains Tribal Epidemiology Center are among those who’ve found themselves blinded by bureaucratic walls. Shewbrooks said the data dearth was particularly evident during the covid pandemic, when her team couldn’t access public health data available to other public health workers in state and local agencies. Her team was forced to manually record positive cases and deaths in the 311 counties of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa — the region the center serves.

Shewbrooks, director of the center’s data-coordinating unit and its lead epidemiologist, estimates staffers spent more than a year’s worth of their time during the pandemic scraping together their own datasets to steer information to tribal leaders making decisions about closing down reservations and asking residents to isolate at home.

She said the process was frustrating and stressful, especially since it robbed her team of hours they could’ve spent trying to save lives in the communities they serve. The tribes in their region were doing “incredible things,” she said, by providing food and shelter for people who needed to quarantine.

“But they were having to do it all without being given real-time understanding of what’s going on around them,” Shewbrooks said.

Contact tracers who work for state governments cover Native American populations, but it’s important to have people from within the community take the lead, Shewbrooks said. Tribal workers are better equipped to move around within their communities and meet people where they are.

Shewbrooks said state contact tracers relied on calling and texting patients, which is often not the most effective method. Tribal members can be a hard-to-reach community for state workers whose protocol is to move on to the next case if they don’t get a response.

“So many cases were just getting closed,” Shewbrooks said.

In 2022, the Government Accountability Office published a report that confirmed concerns raised by tribal health officials, including at the Great Plains tribal epidemiology center. Federal investigators found that health officials working to address public health issues in Native American communities dealt with federal agencies lacking clear processes, policies, and guidelines for sharing data with tribal officials.

In one example, officials said that as of November 2021, 10 of the 12 tribal epidemiology centers in the U.S. had access to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention covid data, but not all had full data. Some centers had access to case surveillance data that included information on positive cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Only half said they also had access to covid vaccination data from HHS.

The GAO report also found that staffers responding to data requests at HHS, the CDC, and the Indian Health Service did not consistently recognize tribal epidemiology centers as public health authorities. Center officials told federal investigators that they’d sometimes been asked to request data they needed as outside researchers or through the Freedom of Information Act.

The report recommended agencies make several corrections, including responding to tribal epidemiology centers as required by law and clarifying how agency staffers should handle requests from epidemiology centers.

HHS officials agreed with all the recommendations. The agency consulted with tribal leaders in fall 2022 and, this year, published a draft policy that clarifies what data centers can access.

Some tribal leaders say the proposal is a step in the right direction but is incomplete. Jim Roberts, senior executive liaison in intergovernmental affairs at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, a nonprofit organization that provides care and advocacy for Alaskan tribes, said the GAO report focused on tribal epidemiology centers, which operate separately from tribal governments, each serving dozens of tribes divided into regions. The report left out tribes, which he said have a right to their data as sovereign nations.

HHS officials declined an interview request, but Samira Burns, principal deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, said the agency is reviewing feedback and recommendations it received from tribal leaders during consultation on the draft policy and will continue to consult with tribes before it’s finalized.

Stronger federal policy on tribal data sharing would help with relationships with states, too, Roberts said. Tribal officials say problems they’ve experienced at the federal level are often worse in states, where laws might not recognize tribes or tribal epidemiology centers as authorities that can receive data.

At the Northwest Tribal Epidemiology Center, which works on behalf of tribes in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, forging a data-use agreement with state governments in Washington and Oregon before the pandemic helped their response by providing immediate access to near real-time data on emergency room and other health care facility visits. The center’s staff used this data to monitor for suspected covid-related visits that could be shared with tribal leaders.

It took seven months for the center to get access to covid surveillance data from the CDC, said Sujata Joshi, director of the Northwest center’s Improving Data and Enhancing Access project, and about nine months for HHS vaccination data after vaccinations became available. Even after getting the information, she said, there were concerns about its quality.


Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez wrote this story for KFF Health News.


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Minnesota has 120 hospitals designated for treating stroke patients but health leaders say more work is needed to reach underserved populations.

The region is getting a nearly $5 million grant to help address the gaps. The American Heart Association and the state health department announced the new funding this week.

Officials said the grant has a pair of key components. One is a public awareness campaign to provide multilingual and culturally relevant messaging on the signs of a stroke and preventive care.

Dr. Haitham Hussein, neurologist at the University of Minnesota and past board president, Twin Cities American Heart Association, said it will be crucial, because his research has shown some eye-opening disparities.

"There was a gap in arrival to the hospital," Hussein explained. "Nonwhite individuals arrived much later, about eight hours later to the hospital when they had a stroke, compared to white individuals."

He pointed out it means limited-English-speaking patients are not getting the necessary medication in quick enough fashion to reverse the effects of a stroke. Another priority of the grant is to implement care standards across the state for people recovering from a stroke, especially for those facing care gaps in rural settings.

Altogether, Hussein emphasized the bookends from the new investment should complement the work Minnesota has already done in building a stroke care system for the region.

"It really addresses gaps that we see every day in our practice," Hussein stressed.

The American Heart Association said the funding, provided by the Helmsley Charitable Trust, will be spread across three years. It will also focus on data collection across diverse types of rehabilitation facilities as a way to guide future care improvements.