Effects of a Culturally Tailored Intervention on Changes in Body Mass Index and Health-Related Quality of Life of Latino Children and Their Parents

Abstract

A culturally tailored program for Latino families reduced BMI for enrolled children and significantly enhanced quality of life for children and parents. Intervention approaches that integrate cultural and social circumstances and emphasize goal setting and life style changes may be fruitful for this population of at-risk children.

Active and Healthy Families: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Culturally Tailored Obesity Intervention for Latino Children

“…Other nonrandomized obesity interventions in primary care have been assessed among Latino youth with mixed results. [31][32][33] Both these RCTs, which took important multidisciplinary approaches, were not necessarily powered to detect BMI or weight changes and were longer in duration than AHF, making it difficult to compare results. However, there were differences between these interventions and AHF with respect to design and participant characteristics.…”

Expanding the Role of Primary Care in the Prevention and Treatment of Childhood Obesity: A Review of Clinic- and Community-Based Recommendations and Interventions

“…Interventions ranged from four to 12 weeks in duration, depending on the study and intervention methods. In addition, there was a general lack of long-term followup results; of the 20 interventions reviewed that had a significant impact on weight status, nine included followup over more than six months [33, 43, 54, 67, 70, 71, 79, 82, 83], and only three followed participants for more than one year [71, 79, 83]. In many cases, evaluations of the initiative were either not conducted or results were not reported.…”

“…Examples of ways that interventions took the cultural, linguistic, or literacy needs of their subjects into account included providing materials and activities in multiple languages, offering recipes to groups that incorporate cultural food preferences, or tailoring materials to families who might have low literacy levels. Of the three studies that explicitly described their efforts to adapt obesity interventions to their population(s), three reported improved weight status among participants [54–56]. These studies used diverse means to adapt to the needs of their populations, which included Latino families (bilingual and bicultural project staff), ethnically diverse youth (traditional recipes), and families with low literacy levels (adapted educational materials).…”

An Integrated Clinic-Community Partnership for Child Obesity Treatment: A Randomized Pilot Trial

“…30 -34 The authors of this study measured quality of life by using a different scale and found a significant improvement; however, a prospective cohort design was used, which limited the conclusion that quality-of-life changes were caused by the intervention. 32 Our randomized controlled design is supportive of the conclusion that a clinic-community model enhances the lives of children in meaningful ways by directly improving quality of life.…”