Self-Reported Patient Compliance With Physician Advised Lifestyle Behavior Changes Among Adults With Musculoskeletal Conditions

Use of primary healthcare services before and after specialized rehabilitation and its relation to changes in health and functioning: a longitudinal cohort study

OBJECTIVE

To examine patients' use of primary healthcare (PHC) before and after specialized rehabilitation and its relation with self-reported health and functioning.

DESIGN

Longitudinal cohort study.

PARTICIPANTS

451 rehabilitation patients.

METHODS

Register data were used to measure the frequency of visits to the general practitioner (GP) and physiotherapist (PT) in PHC 3 years before and after rehabilitation. Patients reported health (EQ-VAS) and functioning (SF-36) before rehabilitation and at 1 and 3 years after. Data are described for the total study cohort and subgroups with musculoskeletal disease (MSD) and cardiovascular disease (CVD).

RESULTS

There was an increase in GP and PT visits preceding rehabilitation and a gradual decrease thereafter. An exception was GP visits among patients with CVD, with few diagnosis-specific visits before but an increase after. Lower levels of health and functioning tended to be related to more frequent GP and PT visits. An indication of clinically important improvement was found among those with frequent GP visits in the MSD subgroup, and among those with 1-2 GP visits in the CVD subgroup.

CONCLUSIONS

The diverse relationship between health and functioning, and the use of PHC services at follow-up, may imply that additional factors besides healthcare use explain long-term improvement following rehabilitation.

Barriers to implementing good nutrition in pregnancy and early childhood: Creating equitable national solutions

Exposure to deleterious stressors in early life, such as poor nutrition, underlies most adult-onset chronic diseases. As rates of chronic disease continue to climb in the United States, a focus on good nutrition before and during pregnancy, lactation, and early childhood provides a potential opportunity to reverse this trend. This report provides an overview of nutrition investigations in pregnancy and early childhood and addresses racial disparities and health outcomes, current national guidelines, and barriers to achieving adequate nutrition in pregnant individuals and children. Current national policies and community interventions to improve nutrition, as well as the current state of nutrition education among healthcare professionals and students, are discussed. Major gaps in knowledge and implementation of nutrition practices during pregnancy and early childhood were identified and action goals were constructed. The action goals are intended to guide the development and implementation of critical nutritional strategies that bridge these gaps. Such goals create a national blueprint for improving the health of mothers and children by promoting long-term developmental outcomes that improve the overall health of the US population.

Patients' perception of lifestyle advice as a mechanism between health shocks and health behaviours: Evidence from a longitudinal study in China

Background

The heavy burden of non-communicable chronic diseases (NCDs) and the deficiency of health behaviours (HB) are threatening the middle- and older-aged population in China. However, little is known about the relational mechanism between health shocks (HS) and HBs, while the importance of patients' perception of lifestyle advice (PPLA) to initiate HB is insufficiently emphasised. In this study, we aimed to examine this perception as a mediator between HS and HB and the variety of mediation effects caused by the different contents of lifestyle advice.

Methods

We retrieved panel data from the two latest waves of a nationally representative cohort, the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). After constructing well-balanced groups through propensity score matching, we conducted descriptive and multilevel logistic regression analyses to analyse the state of and factors influencing PPLA. We employed the Preacher's Sobel test with 1000 replications bootstrap to examine the mediating effect of PPLA.

Results

On a sample of 7922 respondents (post-propensity score matching), we found that HSs had a positive direct effect on HB, with observed decreases in smoking and drinking and increases in exercise. A limited and selected perception of lifestyle advice showed a gap between the advice given by providers and perceived by patients, with gender, education level, social support inside the family, self-reported health, comorbidity, treatment regimens, and utilisation of family doctors being significant influencing factors. Nevertheless, any content of lifestyle advice partially mediated the relationship in which HS increases non-addictive HB (exercise), while only the targeted and detailed content of lifestyle advice about corresponding behaviours partially mediated the effect between HS and addictive HB (smoking and drinking).

Conclusions

This study provides the first evidence that PPLA partially mediates the positive effect of HS on HB. Personalised chronic disease management; targeted advice and interventions; and multiple social resources COULD BE beneficial for patients with HS to initiate HB.

Factors Associated with Physical Activity in a Diverse Older Population

Physical activity is important for healthy aging, but few older adults achieve the goal of 150 min per week of moderate activity. The purpose of this study was to employ a robust statistical approach in the analysis of the factors related to physical activity in a diverse sample of older adults. A secondary analysis of factors associated with calculated MET-h/week was conducted in a sample of 601 African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, European Americans, and Hispanic Americans age 59 to 96 living independently in the community. Age, education, social network, pain, and depression were the five variables that accounted for a statistically significant proportion of unique variance in the model. The strongest correlation to total MET-h/week was with depression. Directionality of the relationship between these variables and physical activity is complex: while pain and depression can reduce physical activity, activity may also help to reduce pain and depression. Additionally, of note is that many of these factors may be modified, calling for the design and testing of individual, group, and community level interventions to increase physical activity in the older population.

The impact of online health community engagement on lifestyle changes: A serially mediated model

Background

Due to reduced physical labor and increased food availability, making healthy lifestyle changes is becoming increasingly challenging. Prior studies have suggested that strong ties (such as friends or family members) help promote positive lifestyle behavior changes while weak ties like online friends hardly make a difference in activating healthy lifestyle changes. More recent studies have found evidence of positive lifestyle changes brought about by health APPs. Yet, the process through which online health community (OHC) engagement is related to healthy lifestyle changes has not been fully explored.

Methods

Drawing on social network theory and the self-efficacy literature, we argued that the information and emotional support which users obtained from OHCs is positively associated with health self-efficacy, which in turn is positively associated with lifestyle changes. Then we constructed a serially mediated model between OHC engagement and healthy lifestyle changes and collected 320 valid questionnaires through an online survey. We tested the model by applying structural equation modeling via Mplus 8.3, which uses bootstrapping (5,000 samples) to test the significance of the mediated paths.

Results

This study demonstrated that the informational and emotional support that users receive from OHC engagement positively affects healthy lifestyle changes via the mediating role of health self-efficacy. We also found that healthy lifestyle changes are an outcome of enhanced health self-efficacy through the effect of informational and emotional support from OHC engagement.

Conclusions

Our findings help explain how OHC users make healthy lifestyle changes by utilizing the informational and emotional support to develop health self-efficacy. The results also highlight the value of informational and emotional support as important resources which users acquire from OHC engagement. Thus, we suggest that OHC users utilize the informational and emotional support to enhance health self-efficacy and facilitate healthy lifestyle changes. Future research could explore the dynamic process through which OHC engagement influences lifestyle changes by designing longitudinal research and addressing the limitations of the present study.