CONTROLLED TRIAL OF LIFESKILL WORKSHOP ON BLOOD PRESSURE

Large corporations are increasingly looking to purchase behavioral interventions for employee wellness programs; however, although many interventions have been demonstrated to cost-effectively improve health outcomes, few commercially viable products are available. Hostility and anger expression style have been demonstrated as risk factors for hypertension, itself a risk factor for CHD. Recent research suggests that anger management training reduces blood pressure, and leads to improvement in psychosocial risk factors, e.g., depression. The Williams LifeSkills workshop, based on the book "Anger Kills", and its successor, "Lifeskills", has shown in pilot studies to improve psychosocial risk factors, and is currently marketed in a limited manner to corporations and government agencies. The marketability of this product, however, would be far greater if supported by extended research demonstrating its effects on blood pressure reduction, as well as showing, in a corporate setting, decreased hostility and depressive symptoms, as well as strong cost-effectiveness, compared with standard care procedures recommended by JNC-VI guidelines. We propose a randomized controlled trial test of the Williams LifeSkills workshop in a hospital setting. We hypothesize that employees who undertake the LifeSkills workshop will show improved blood pressure, psychosocial risk factors, and decreased costs associated with treatment. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS: Psychosocial risk factors have been strongly related to many health problems, notably CVD. Research has shown that behavioral interventions have great promise to ameliorate the distress, the health- damaging effects and the costs associated with these risk factors; but few such programs have been implemented in a large-scale way. Corporations are increasingly interested in providing such services, but they have had difficulties in knowing which programs are most effective. Until these programs are developed as commercially viable products, dissemination of these programs will be hindered. In sum; these findings make a strong case that the development of a protocol- driven behavioral intervention package that can be delivered in a wide range of corporate settings presents a remarkable commercial opportunity.