Her cause is simple: Cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer of women in the United States.

So every Thursday morning at about 10:30, Elizabeth Howard, a tenured nursing professor at Northeastern, goes to People’s Baptist Church in Roxbury to meet with a group of 20 black women. The demographic they represent has a particularly high risk for health problems including high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes, she said, and through education and motivation she hopes to help them beat the odds.

“It’s an underdog, under-researched problem,” Howard said. “The ultimate goal is to get them to adopt a program of regular physical activity. When you look at some of the risks of cardiovascular disease, you can’t do anything about them – like age and history. But others … can be helped by exercise and diet.”

Her intervention project, scheduled to last 12 weeks, started early this month, she said.

About 39 percent of all female deaths in America result from cardiovascular disease, according to the American Heart Association, and heart disease is prominent among minority women. The death rate due to heart disease is substantially higher in black women than in white women, according to the association.

“This is an important social problem, and she has some very innovative ways she wants to study it, with the intent that it will lead to education and motivational strategies and behavioral skills,” said Srinivas Sridhar, Northeastern’s vice provost for research.

Late last year, the Provost’s office and the Faculty Senate awarded Howard $15,000 through the university’s ENHANCE program, initiated in Fall 2007 to support research and scholarship by tenured faculty. The decision to give Howard aid was based on the success of her previous work, and her unique methodological approach, Sridhar said.

“She’s already done some work [in the field],” he said. “She has implemented an exercise program and educational interventions, and these can carry over into this new program that she started.”

Howard’s method is shaped carefully around a theory called the Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills (IMB) Model. Every week, during meetings that last about an hour and a half, she focuses with the women on each component of the model: information, motivation and behavior.

They talk about specifics, she said: heart disease and hypertension, cholesterol, special diets, their current exercise habits, effective exercise routines and how they can motivate themselves on a daily basis to live well. The components are fundamental in reducing prominent health risks, Howard said.

“Some of them say that they just don’t know what the exercises are they need to do,” she said, while others have lost access, for one reason or another, to local gyms like the YMCA. “Living in an urban environment is a stress enough – that there are both emotional and physical stresses that raise [people’s] blood pressure. And in fact, when I check [on a weekly basis], nearly all of them are hypertensive, or on hypertension medication.”

While the intervention in Roxbury started just this month, Howard has studied cardiovascular health in women since 2005, and has focused specifically on faith-based communities, said Nancy Hoffart, dean of the School of Nursing.

“She’s used a very deliberate methodological approach to develop the intervention,” she said. “It’s an approach that’s been found useful by other researchers – accessing [people] through their churches.”

During her first group study in Spring 2005, Howard said she worked with women from her own Catholic parish in Norwood. At Saint Timothy’s, she met with suburban white women, a demographic starkly different from the one at People’s Baptist Church. But faith – religion aside – is a significant common denominator, she said.

Because the women in both study groups had been coming together anyway, united by the church, there existed among them a motivating factor besides exercise and health, she said. This allowed for Howard to introduce her program to a support group already well established, rather than developing a new, potentially disparate group bound only by issues of cardiovascular health.

The 20 women at People’s Baptist Church are “inspirational singers,” Howard said, who meet regularly to sing hymns or play bingo. Now, she said, they work heart-awareness into their routine, and have responded positively.

“Trying to change a pattern of behavior is challenging, particularly for older adults,” Sridhar said. “First, we need to understand it.”