Preventive medicine
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Preventive medicine · Jun 2017
Review Meta AnalysisMedication adherence outcomes of 771 intervention trials: Systematic review and meta-analysis.
Excellent medication adherence contributes to decreases in morbidity, mortality, and health care costs. Although researchers have tested many interventions to increase adherence, results are sometimes conflicting and often unclear. This systematic review applied meta-analytic procedures to integrate primary research that tested medication adherence interventions. ⋯ Publication bias was present. This most comprehensive review to date documented that, although interventions can increase adherence, much room remains for improvement. Findings suggest health care providers should focus intervention content on behavioral strategies, especially habit-based interventions, more so than cognitive strategies designed to change knowledge and beliefs.
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Preventive medicine · Jun 2017
Believability of new diseases reported in the 2014 Surgeon General's Report on smoking: Experimental results from a national survey of US adults.
Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable disease and death globally. The 2014 Surgeon General's Report included new diseases linked to smoking, including liver and colon cancer, diabetes and tuberculosis. As more diseases are linked to smoking, which diseases should we communicate to the public and what message source has the most impact? ⋯ Important differences exist in believability of disease messages about new tobacco-related information. Messages emphasizing the causal link between smoking and new diseases should be considered for use in mass media campaigns.
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Preventive medicine · Jun 2017
Parents' willingness to get human papillomavirus vaccination for their adolescent children at a pharmacy.
Pharmacies are promising alternative settings for human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination because of their accessibility and existing infrastructure for vaccine delivery. We sought to examine parents' willingness to get HPV vaccination for their children at pharmacies. In 2014, we conducted a national, online survey of 1255 parents of 11- to 17-year-old adolescents in the United States. ⋯ Parents most often indicated that they would like to learn about HPV vaccination in pharmacies from their children's doctor (37%). Offering HPV vaccine in pharmacies may increase uptake as a meaningful number of parents would get the vaccine for their children in these settings. Physician referrals for completing the HPV vaccine series may serve as an important source for increasing awareness of and demand for adolescent vaccination services in pharmacies.
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The objective of this paper is to estimate the impact of county-level public transit usage on obesity prevalence in the United States and assess the potential for public transit usage as an intervention for obesity. This study adopts an instrumental regression approach to implicitly control for potential selection bias due to possible differences in commuting preferences among obese and non-obese populations. ⋯ The results of this instrumental regression analysis suggest that a one percent increase in county population usage of public transit is associated with a 0.221 percent decrease in county population obesity prevalence at the α=0.01 statistical significance level, when commuting preferences, amount of non-travel physical activity, education level, health resource, and distribution of income are fixed. Hence, this study provides empirical support for the effectiveness of encouraging public transit usage as an intervention strategy for obesity.
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Preventive medicine · Jun 2017
The association of dietary inflammatory potential with depression and mental well-being among U.S. adults.
Current treatment for depression is not considered effective among all cases and, thus far, nutritional protocols are minimal within depression treatment guidelines. Recently, there has been increasing interest in a possible protective and modifiable role of diet in common mental disorders, including depression, due to pro- and anti-inflammatory properties of nutrients. This study aims to investigate whether the Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII), designed to estimate the inflammatory potential of diet, is associated with depression and other measures of mental health. ⋯ Results of this study indicate that dietary inflammatory potential is associated with depression. These results are consistent with existing hypotheses that inflammatory pathways play a role in the etiology of depression. Further research examining the underlying biological and cellular mechanisms of depression is warranted.