Hospital Intervention to Reduce Overweight with Educational Reinforcement after Discharge: A Multicenter Randomized Clinical Trial Herrera Espiñeira, Carmen Martínez Cirre, María del Carmen López Morales, Manuel Salmerón López, Laura Esther Expósito Ruiz, Manuela Overweight Exercise Food habits Patients Internal medicine Clinical trial Introduction: Obesity and overweight affect more than one-third of the world’s population and pose a major public health problem. Objective: To evaluate the impact of an educational intervention on dietary habits and physical exercise in patients with overweight admitted to departments of internal medicine, comprising a pre-discharge educational session with follow-up and reinforcement by telephone at 3, 6, and, 12 months post-discharge. Outcome variables were weight, systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressures, health-related quality of life (HRQOL), hospital readmissions, emergency department visits, and death. Method: A randomized experimental study with a control group was performed in hospitalized non-diabetic adults aged 18 years with body mass index (BMI) 25 kg/m2. Results and conclusions: The final sample included 273 patients. At three months post-discharge, the intervention group had lower SBP and DPB and improved dietary habits (assessed using the Pardo Questionnaire) and VAS-assessed HRQOL in comparison to the control group but a worse EQ-5Q-5L-assessed HRQOL. There were no between-group differences in hospital readmissions, emergency department visits, or mortality at any time point. Both groups evidenced a progressive improvement over the three follow-up periods in weight, SBP, and dietary habits but a worsening of EQ-5D-5L-value-assessed HRQOL. Discussion: The intervention group showed greater improvements over the short term, but between-group differences disappeared at 6 and 12 months. Weight loss and improvements in key outcomes were observed in both groups over the follow-up period. Further research is warranted to determine whether a minimum intervention with an educational leaflet, follow-up phone calls, and questionnaires on overweight-related healthy habits, as in the present control group, may be an equally effective strategy without specific individual educational input. 2022-07-27T10:54:11Z 2022-07-27T10:54:11Z 2022-06-16 journal article Herrera-Espiñeira, C... [et al.]. Hospital Intervention to Reduce Overweight with Educational Reinforcement after Discharge: A Multicenter Randomized Clinical Trial. Nutrients 2022, 14, 2499. [https://doi.org/10.3390/nu14122499] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/76380 10.3390/nu14122499 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional MDPI