Design and methods of the Healthy Kids and Families study: a parent-focused community health worker-delivered childhood obesity prevention intervention
UMass Chan Affiliations
Prevention Research CenterDepartment of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine
Document Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2019-06-03Keywords
Childhood obesity preventionCommunity health worker
Parent-focused intervention
Community-Based Research
Community Health and Preventive Medicine
Health Services Administration
Health Services Research
Nutritional and Metabolic Diseases
Pathological Conditions, Signs and Symptoms
Preventive Medicine
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Background: One third of U.S. children and two thirds of adults are overweight or obese. Interventions to prevent obesity and thus avert threats to public health are needed. This paper describes the design and methods of the Healthy Kids and Families study, which tested the effect of a parent-focused community health worker (CHW)-delivered lifestyle intervention to prevent childhood obesity. Methods: Participants were English or Spanish-speaking parent-child dyads (n = 247) from nine elementary schools (grades K-6) located in racial/ethnically diverse low-income communities in Worcester, Massachusetts. Using a quasi-experimental design with the school as the level of allocation, the study compared the lifestyle intervention vs. an attention-control comparison condition. The lifestyle intervention was guided by social cognitive theory and social ecological principles. It targeted the child's social and physical home environment by intervening with parental weight-related knowledge, beliefs, and skills for managing child obesogenic behaviors; and addressed families' needs for community resources supportive of a healthy lifestyle. The two-year CHW-delivered intervention was structured based on the 5As model (Agenda, Assess, Advise, Assist, Arrange follow up) and included two in person sessions and two telephone follow-ups per year with the parent, with a personalized letter and print materials sent after each contact. Parents also received quarterly newsletters, Facebook messages, and invitations to community events. The attention-control comparison condition used the same format and contact time as the intervention condition, but targeted positive parenting skills. Measurements occurred at baseline, and at 6-, 12-, 18- and 24-month follow-up. Assessments included anthropometrics, accelerometry, global positioning system (GPS), and self-report surveys. The primary outcome was child body mass index (BMI) z score. Secondary outcomes were parent BMI; and parent and child diet, physical activity, sedentariness, and utilization of community resources supportive of a healthy lifestyle. Discussion: A CHW-delivered parent-focused lifestyle intervention may provide a translatable model for targeting the high priority public health problem of childhood obesity among low-income diverse communities. If demonstrated effective, this intervention has potential for high impact. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials NCT03028233. Registered January 23,2017. The trial was retrospectively registered.Source
BMC Obes. 2019 Jun 3;6:19. doi: 10.1186/s40608-019-0240-x. eCollection 2019. Link to article on publisher's site
DOI
10.1186/s40608-019-0240-xPermanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/41080PubMed ID
31171975Related Resources
Rights
© The Author(s). 2019 Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Distribution License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Scopus Count
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver
(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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