Moving Focus from Weight to Health. What Are the Components Used in Interventions to Improve Cardiovascular Health in Children?

INTRODUCTION: Obesity in childhood impacts on many areas of the child’s current and future health, including their cardiovascular health. To date many attempts have been made to design interventions to tackle excess childhood weight but with limited success. We aimed to establish the components common to interventions in children that improve cardiovascular health parameters. METHODS: We searched the following databases: EMBASE 1974-week 3 November 2014, Ovid Medline 1946 Present, and PsychINFO 1967-Present for studies reporting interventions in healthy young people under the age of 18. Included interventions had to contain an education component and have been carried out in a community, school, or clinical setting. Papers had to report on at least one of the pre-specified CVD risk parameters and at least one non-biological outcome from knowledge, attitudes or behaviours. RESULTS: We retrieved 2451 papers, from which 12 studies (18 papers) of 3046 participants were included. From the selected papers we identified four component themes; Health Behaviours, Self-Concept, Practical and Cognitive Tools, and Intervention Characteristics. The subcomponents that made up these themes were fairly consistent across the studies analysed although the studies varied in their duration, settings and children with which they were carried out. Nine of the studies were able to bring about positive change in at least one biological and one non-biological aspect of child cardiovascular health. CONCLUSION: The component themes identified here were common to intervention studies that had success in improving parameters of cardiovascular health. We suggest that the focus of childhood health interventions be moved from weight onto cardiovascular health parameters and that future interventions use the lessons learned by their predecessors to incorporate those components that are associated with successful interventions.