Physical Activity InterventionsEffects of interventions in health care settings on physical activity or cardiorespiratory fitness
Section snippets
Methods
We defined primary prevention interventions as those targeting patients without existing disease, and secondary prevention interventions as those targeting patients with known existing chronic or acute disease. Interventions delivered in primary care settings with no explicit patient selection based on disease were considered primary prevention. For secondary prevention, we focused on CVD because of the preponderance of physical activity studies in patients with CVD. Because we were interested
Primary prevention studies
We identified 12 randomized controlled or quasi-experimental studies that evaluated physical activity education or counseling in primary care settings (Table 1). We give sample sizes of providers as well as patients; sample sizes of patients ranged from 54 to over 6,000. We also describe the training and materials given to providers separately from the training and materials given to the patients.
The mean age of participants in most studies was 35 to 50 years; two included only older
Discussion and conclusions
Interventions to promote physical activity have a part to play within the continuum of patient care delivered in health care settings, including primary prevention programs for all patients and treatments for patients with existing disease. This review focuses on studies of physical activity interventions in primary care for primary prevention and controlled trials of secondary prevention with a physical activity component delivered to patients with CVD, although a review of physical activity
Acknowledgements
The authors thank John Fisher and Christine L. Ameika for their assistance in conducting and reviewing literature searches and Colleen Brown for manuscript preparation.
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