Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Aug 5, 2019
Date Accepted: Dec 16, 2019
The effect of an empowering lifestyle-change intervention on the mobile phone to improve healthy nutrition in women before and during early pregnancy: a single centre randomised controlled trial.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Unhealthy nutrition contributes to the worldwide rising prevalence of non-communicable diseases. As most adverse reproductive outcomes originate during the periconception period, effective interventions targeting this period are needed. Therefore, we developed the lifestyle intervention Smarter Pregnancy to empower women adapting a healthy diet prior to conception and during early pregnancy and performed a randomised controlled trial.
Objective:
The objectives of this trial are to investigate the compliance and effectiveness in women using the Smarter Pregnancy program.
Methods:
Women between 18 and 45 years of age, who were contemplating pregnancy or <13 weeks pregnant and their male partner were living in the urban area of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, were eligible for participation. After baseline screening, the intervention group received personal online coaching based on identified inadequate intakes of vegetables, fruits and or folic acid supplements. The sum of these risk factors was used as a dietary risk score (DRS), ranging from 0 (healthy) to 9 (unhealthy). The control group did not receive coaching. We applied an intention-to-treat principle and used a multivariable linear regression model to evaluate the change in DRS after 24 weeks. Compliance was defined as the percentage of women who completed the screening questionnaire at 24 weeks.
Results:
218 women were recruited, of whom 81.2% (n=177) completed the programme (intervention: 83.5% (n=91), control: 78.9% (n=86), p =.948). After 24 weeks, the reduction in DRS of women in the intervention group was significantly larger than in the control group (β=0.75, 95%CI: 0.18-1.34). This reduction was mainly due to increased vegetable intake (β=0.55, 95%CI: 0.25-0.86).
Conclusions:
The high compliance and the larger improvements in nutritional behaviours, especially vegetable intake, in women in the intervention group emphasizes the effectiveness of empowering women by using the lifestyle-change intervention Smarter Pregnancy. Clinical Trial: Netherlands trial register: NTR4150.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© 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.