Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth

Date Submitted: Feb 26, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 1, 2019 - Apr 10, 2019
Date Accepted: Apr 20, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

A Community-Based Short Message Service Intervention to Improve Mothers’ Feeding Practices for Obesity Prevention: Quasi-Experimental Study

Jiang H, Li M, Wen LM, Baur L, He G, Ma X, Qian X

A Community-Based Short Message Service Intervention to Improve Mothers’ Feeding Practices for Obesity Prevention: Quasi-Experimental Study

JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 2019;7(6):e13828

DOI: 10.2196/13828

PMID: 31162133

PMCID: 6638993

Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.

A Community-Based Short Message Service Intervention to Improve Mothers’ Feeding Practices for Obesity Prevention: Quasi-Experimental Study

  • Hong Jiang; 
  • Mu Li; 
  • Li Ming Wen; 
  • Louise Baur; 
  • Gengsheng He; 
  • Xiaoying Ma; 
  • Xu Qian

Background:

The prevalence of childhood obesity is increasing in China, and the effect of mobile phone short message service (SMS) interventions to prevent early childhood obesity needs to be evaluated.

Objective:

The objective of this study was to assess the effect of an SMS intervention on the prevention of obesity in young children.

Methods:

A quasi-experimental design SMS intervention was carried out in 4 community health centers (CHCs) in Shanghai, China. A total of 2 CHCs were assigned to the intervention group, and 2 CHCs were assigned to the control group. Mothers in the intervention group received weekly SMS messages on breastfeeding and infant feeding from the third trimester to 12 months postpartum. The primary outcomes were children’s body mass index (BMI), BMI z-score, and weight-for-length z-score at 12 and 24 months. Factors associated with higher BMI and weight-for-length z-score at 24 months were also assessed.

Results:

A total of 582 expectant mothers were recruited at the beginning of the third gestational trimester. 477 (82.0%) and 467 (80.2%) mothers and their children were followed up to 12 and 24 months postpartum, respectively. There were no significant differences in children’s BMI, BMI z-score, and weight-for-length z-score at 12 and 24 months between the 2 groups. Factors associated with higher BMI, BMI z-score, and weight-for-length z-score at 24 months included higher birth weight, introduction of solid foods before 4 months, and taking a bottle to bed at 12 months.

Conclusions:

The SMS intervention did not show a significant effect on children’s BMI, BMI z-score, or weight-for-length z-score at 12 and 24 months. Introduction of solid foods before 4 months and taking a bottle to bed at 12 months were significantly and positively correlated with a higher BMI, BMI z-score, and weight-for-length z-score at 24 months. Further studies with more rigorous design are needed to evaluate the effect of SMS interventions on preventing early childhood obesity.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Jiang H, Li M, Wen LM, Baur L, He G, Ma X, Qian X

A Community-Based Short Message Service Intervention to Improve Mothers’ Feeding Practices for Obesity Prevention: Quasi-Experimental Study

JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 2019;7(6):e13828

DOI: 10.2196/13828

PMID: 31162133

PMCID: 6638993

Per the author's request the PDF is not available.

© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.