American journal of preventive medicine
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Smoking in movies is prevalent. However, use of content analysis to describe trends in smoking in movies has provided mixed results and has not tapped what adolescents actually perceive. ⋯ Teenagers' perception of the prevalence of smoking in movies declined over time, which may be attributable to changes made by the movie industry. Despite the decline, teenagers were still exposed to a moderate amount of smoking imagery. Interventions that further reduce teenage exposure to smoking in movies may be needed to have an effect on adolescent smoking.
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Asthma exacerbations are commonly triggered by exposure to allergens and irritants within the home. The purpose of this review was to evaluate evidence that interventions that target reducing these triggers through home visits may be beneficial in improving asthma outcomes. The interventions involve home visits by trained personnel to conduct two or more components that address asthma triggers in the home. Intervention components focus on reducing exposures to a range of asthma triggers (allergens and irritants) through environmental assessment, education, and remediation. ⋯ Home-based, multi-trigger, multicomponent interventions with an environmental focus are effective in improving overall quality of life and productivity in children and adolescents with asthma. The effectiveness of these interventions in adults is inconclusive due to the small number of studies and inconsistent results. Additional studies are needed to (1) evaluate the effectiveness of these interventions in adults and (2) determine the individual contributions of the various intervention components.
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Sedentary time (too much sitting) increasingly is being recognized as a distinct health risk behavior. This paper reviews the reliability and validity of self-reported and device-based sedentary time measures and provides recommendations for their use in population-based studies. ⋯ Data from the 2003-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey are utilized to compare the descriptive epidemiology of sedentary time that arises from the use of different sedentary time measures. A key recommendation from this review is that, wherever possible, population-based monitoring of sedentary time should incorporate both self-reported measures (to capture important domain- and behavior-specific sedentary time information) and device-based measures (to measure both total sedentary time and patterns of sedentary time accumulation).
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The White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity has set a goal of increasing walking and biking to school by 50% within 5 years. Meeting the goal requires a detailed understanding of the current patterns of school travel. ⋯ There have been sharp increases in driving children to school since 1969 and corresponding decreases in walking to school. This increase is particularly evident in the number of vehicle trips generated by parents dropping children at school and teens driving themselves. The NHTS survey provides a unique opportunity to monitor these trends in the future.
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A recent systematic review of home-based, multi-trigger, multicomponent interventions with an environmental focus showed their effectiveness in reducing asthma morbidity among children and adolescents. These interventions included home visits by trained personnel to assess the level of and reduce adverse effects of indoor environmental pollutants, and educate households with an asthma client to reduce exposure to asthma triggers. The purpose of the present review is to identify economic values of these interventions and present ranges for the main economic outcomes (e.g., program costs, benefit-cost ratios, and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios). ⋯ The benefits from home-based, multi-trigger, multicomponent interventions with an environmental focus can match or even exceed their program costs. Based on cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness studies, the results of this review show that these programs provide a good value for dollars spent on the interventions.