Health Literacy and Outcomes of a Community-Based Self-Help Intervention

Abstract

Background: Although scientific reports increasingly document the negative impact of inadequate health literacy on health-seeking behaviors, health literacy's effect on health outcomes in patients with diabetes is not entirely clear, owing to insufficient empirical studies, mixed findings, and insufficient longitudinal research. Objective: The aim of this study was to empirically examine underlying mechanisms of health literacy's role in diabetes management among a group of Korean Americans with Type 2 diabetes mellitus. Methods: Data from a randomized clinical trial of a health literacy-focused Type 2 diabetes selfmanagement intervention conducted during 2012-2016 in the Korean American community were collected at baseline and at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. A total of 250 Korean Americans with Type 2 diabetes participated (intervention, 120; control, 130). Participants were first-generation Korean

Establishing the efficacy of interventions to improve health literacy and health behaviours: a systematic review

“…Of the 22 included studies, the earliest study was from 2014 [30], the latest from 2020 [35][36][37] with the majority (fourteen) being published since 2018 [32-37, 44, 45, 47-52]. Eighteen studies were randomised and included 1 cross over design [50], 5 cluster randomised [39,41,44,47,51] and 12 individually randomised trials [30-32, 34, 36-38, 40, 43, 45, 49, 52].…”

“…The remaining four were quasi-experimental pre-post controlled trials [33,35,42,48]. Studies took place in nine countries -USA [30,31,37,39,40,42,43,45], Australia [35,51,52], Iran [32,34,47], China [41,44], Japan [36,49], Taiwan [48], Niger [38], Germany [50] and Demark [33].…”

“…Two studies focused on the domain of disease prevention (cancer screening [39] and malaria health literacy [38]), eight focused on healthcare (diabetes [30,37], gestational diabetes [32], breast cancer [36], cardiac conditions [33,34], one or more chronic conditions [35] and people taking two or more medications daily [31]). The remaining 12 studies focused on health promotion with eight focusing on general health promotion [41,42,44,45,48,[50][51][52], two focusing on nutrition [40,43], one on nutrition and physical activity [49] and one on smoking prevention [47].…”

“…Eight studies focused on specific ethnic groups or migrants from either Asia (Korea [37,39], China [38], Vietnam or Indonesia [48]), or Mexico [30,40,42,45]. All participants were adults and most studies covered the whole age spectrum however one study only included people aged 18-35 [32], two specified working age adults [38,39], and six focused on the later years in life with minimum age of 40 [40], 50 [35], 55 [31,52], 60 [44] and 65 [49] respectively.…”

“…There was considerable variation in how health literacy was defined and measured (see Table 2). Six studies [36,40,42,43,45,47] did not provide a definition, two [31,34] gave a definition but no clear reference to identify it, and the remaining 14 studies referenced 10 different definitions (three studies [30,35,48] gave multiple definitions) with Ratzan and Parker [54] used in five studies [30,35,37,39,51] and Sorensen [6] cited in four studies [33,[48][49][50].…”