Background: Osteoporosis is one of the diseases that can be prevented by correcting health behaviors during adolescence.
Objective: This study was conducted to evaluate the effect of education on preventive behaviors of osteoporosis including physical activity, calcium intake and practice (primary outcomes) and knowledge and attitude related to osteoporosis (secondary outcomes) in adolescents.
Method: A search was done in Cochrane Library, PubMed, Embase, Web of Sciences, Scopus, Google Scholar, SID and Magiran regardless of the time limit. To evaluate the quality of selected controlled trials, Cochrane collaboration' instrument was used for assessing the risk of bias. RevMan software was used to analysis and report the data.
Results: Of 2159 articles retrieved, 20 of them were reviewed and 18 of them entered the mete-analysis. The meta-analysis showed significant differences between the education and control groups in terms of calcium intake (SMD = 0.78, 95%CI = 0.55 to 1.02, P < 0.00001), practice (SMD = 0.54, 95%CI = 0.41 to 0.68, P < 0.0001), knowledge (SMD = 1.76, 95%CI = 1.10 to 2.42, P < 0.00001) and attitude (SMD = 0.96, 95%CI = 0.53 to 1.40, P < 0.0001) mean score in adolescents but education is not effective on average minute/week of physical activity per week (MD = 31.94, 95%CI = -6.53 to 70.40, P = 0.10), mean score of physical activity (MD = 2.66, 95%CI = -0.55 to 5.88, P = 0.10) and percent of students participated in the physical activity (OR = 1.45, 95%CI = 0.30 to 6.91, P = 0.64).
Conclusion: Education is effective in improving their knowledge and attitudes toward osteoporosis. It can also improve some health-related behaviors for bone health such as sufficient dairy calcium intake but it has not been effective in establishing a regular exercise program.
Keywords: adolescent; bone; education; osteoporosis.