Development of a checklist to assess potentially effective components in combined lifestyle interventions for children with overweight or obesity

Jenneke J E H Saat; Gerdine A J Fransen; Elke Naumann; Koos van der Velden; Willem J J Assendelft

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0289481

Development of a checklist to assess potentially effective components in combined lifestyle interventions for children with overweight or obesity

PLoS One. 2023 Sep 28;18(9):e0289481. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289481. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Jenneke J E H Saat^{1

2}, Gerdine A J Fransen¹, Elke Naumann², Koos van der Velden¹, Willem J J Assendelft³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Primary and Community Care, Academic Collaborative Centre AMPHI, ELG 117, Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
² Research Group Nutrition, Dietetics and Lifestyle, HAN University of Applied Sciences, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
³ Department of Primary and Community Care, ELG 117, Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Abstract

Background: In the Netherlands, Combined Lifestyle Interventions (CLIs), offered in primary care, aim to reduce the number of children with overweight or obesity. CLIs are carried out by a multidisciplinary team and focus on dietary advice and guidance, exercise and behaviour change. These CLIs are not uniformly designed and vary in protocols to suit the local circumstances. Due to the variation in content of CLIs it is difficult to investigate their effectiveness. To enable a proper evaluation of CLIs, we first need to unravel the 'black boxes' of CLIs by identifying the various potentially effective components.

Methods: First of all we identified potentially effective components in literature. Subsequently we organized an online consultation with experts with diverse backgrounds and asked if they could add potentially effective components. These components were then assembled into a checklist meant to determine the presence or absence of potentially effective components in CLIs for children.

Results: 42 experts participated. We identified 65 potentially effective components for CLIs for children with overweight or obesity that we categorized into three themes: content, organisation and implementation.

Conclusions: Based on literature and expert opinions we developed a practical 65-item checklist to determine the presence of potentially effective components in a CLI. This checklist can be used in the development of CLIs as well as evaluation of CLIs.

Copyright: © 2023 Saat et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Checklist*
Child
Exercise
Humans
Life Style
Obesity / therapy
Overweight* / therapy

Grants and funding

J. Saat received The study (design, collection, analysis and interprettion of data and in writing the manuscript) was supported by a PhD grant from the HAN University of Applied Sciences, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.