American journal of preventive medicine
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Motivating public school districts to adopt sun protection policies: a randomized controlled trial.
In 2002, CDC recommended that the nation's schools establish policies that reduce sun exposure to decrease students' risk of skin cancer. ⋯ Multifaceted promotion can increase adoption of stronger policies for reducing sun exposure of students by public school districts. Future research should explore how policies are implemented by schools.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Maintenance of exercise after phase II cardiac rehabilitation: a randomized controlled trial.
Patients who have completed Phase II cardiac rehabilitation have low rates of maintenance of exercise after program completion, despite the importance of sustaining regular exercise to prevent future cardiac events. ⋯ A telephone-based intervention can help maintain exercise, prevent regression in motivational readiness for exercise, and improve physical functioning in this patient population.
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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).