American journal of preventive medicine
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Randomized Controlled Trial
The Faith, Activity, and Nutrition program: a randomized controlled trial in African-American churches.
Faith-based interventions hold promise for promoting health in ethnic minority populations. To date, however, few of these interventions have used a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach, have targeted both physical activity and healthy eating, and have focused on structural changes in the church. ⋯ This faith-based structural intervention using a CBPR framework showed small but significant increases in self-reported leisure-time MVPA. This program has potential for broad-based dissemination and reach.
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Changes in total energy intake have been reported among children and adolescents, but the extent to which the components of total energy-energy density; portion size; and the number of eating/drinking occasions (EO)-drive these changes is unknown. ⋯ These findings highlight potentially important intervention targets for reducing energy imbalances in U.S. youth.
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The field of behavioral economics combines psychology and economics to investigate how individuals actually behave as opposed to how they would behave if they were being perfectly rational (as in the sense of maximizing their utility). Although initial applications focused on consumer behavior, such as explaining why people failed to save adequately for retirement, the field has moved increasingly into the area of explaining health behaviors as well as the design of lifestyle interventions, such as weight loss and smoking-cessation programs. This article provides an overview of several important behavioral economics concepts of relevance to public health and health behavior change.
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Recently, suicide exceeded motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury death in the U.S. However, details of this change in suicide methods and the relationship to individual demographics, such as age and societal influences, have not been reported. ⋯ Substantial increases in suicide by hanging/suffocation and poisoning merit attention from policymakers and call for innovations and changes in suicide prevention approaches.
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Child abuse is highly prevalent and associated with increased risk for a range of health problems, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, psychiatric disorders, and other health problems. Little is currently known about the mechanism by which early adversity confers risk for health problems later in life. ⋯ Although replication is required, this study suggests that epigenetic mechanisms may be associated with risk for health problems later in life in maltreated children. This study lays the groundwork for future studies examining health and methylation measures to further characterize the role of epigenetic mechanisms in conferring risk for medical problems in individuals with histories of early adversity.