Melissa Goulding
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
High blood pressure is usually thought of as an adult problem, but it affects about 1.3 million young people. Children and teens with hypertension have two to three times the risk of heart attack and stroke later in life.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
pediatric hypertension
high blood pressure
blood pressure screening
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2030
What they work on
- Refine and co-develop BP-Link, a pediatric clinic program for follow-up blood pressure screening, by working with clinic providers, staff and parents through stakeholder-engaged implementation mapping.
- Pilot BP-Link in pediatric clinics using a parallel cluster randomized design, in which whole clinics rather than individual patients are assigned to receive the program.
- Evaluate how BP-Link works in practice from the views of providers, support staff and parents, using convergent mixed methods that combine numerical measures with qualitative interviews.
- Establish whether a full-scale trial is feasible by testing the BP-Link protocol and using electronic health record data to explore effects on blood pressure follow-up in children.
More about the research
Pediatric guidelines recommend regular blood pressure checks and a follow-up check after any high reading. In practice, that follow-up often never happens, so most cases of childhood hypertension go undiagnosed. This work asks how pediatric clinics can reliably catch high blood pressure early so that heart health can be protected across the whole lifespan.
Why it matters
Most children with high blood pressure are never diagnosed, even though the condition raises their adult risk of heart attack and stroke. A practical clinic program that makes follow-up checks routine could help pediatric practices find and manage hypertension earlier. This could benefit children and families and support heart health into adulthood. The pilot results are meant to inform a fully powered trial of a program that could be scaled to many clinics.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Matthew Hickey
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Identify patient-level barriers to taking blood pressure medication within an integrated HIV–hypertension care model in rural Kenya, using theory-informed mixed methods within the SEARCH SAPPHIRE trial.
Devin Mann
New York University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop community health worker training modules for remote blood pressure monitoring, plus electronic health record support tools, using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research and user-centered design.
Mark Huffman
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Analyze through multi-level mediation how team-based care in the WHO HEARTS package lowers blood pressure at clinic and patient levels in the Hypertension Treatment in Nigeria Program.
The school
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School: 29 labs on PI Pages, $350M a year on research, 55 research doctorates a year.
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