BLOOM Study (Now Recruiting)

Please click here to find out if you are eligible for this study!

The purpose of the study is to examine the impact of Black women’s daily experiences and behaviors (i.e., where you live, what you do, and how you feel) on their cardiovascular health. Black women are  an understudied population in biomedical research, so we really appreciate your interest in participating in our study!

This study involves two on-campus visits at UT Arlington and a 10-day self-monitoring period with wearable devices and answering brief electronic survey questions on your smartphone.

The first on-campus visit will involve a series of lab-based assessments to measure your vascular health, including a blood draw that would require 8-hr fasting. This visit will take about 2 – 2.5 hours to complete. At the end of this visit, we will provide you with a wrist-worn activity tracker and a blood pressure monitor bracelet for you to wear in the next 10 days. We will also give you an at-home saliva self-collection kit for you to provide your saliva samples so that we can obtain information about your cortisol level across the day (which is a biomarker to indicate your psychological stress). You will provide four saliva samples for three consecutive days.

During the 10-day self-monitoring period, you will also need to answer 6 brief electronic surveys each day via a smartphone app. These surveys will ask about your feelings, your behaviors, and your experience of microaggression and discrimination, if any.

After the 10-day self-monitoring period, you will return to our UT Arlington campus and give us back the study devices and your collected saliva samples. We will give you the study compensation and some of your study results during this visit. Study participants will be compensated for their time and effort on a pro-rated basis for completing all the study procedures.