Health Behaviors

The goal of this randomized controlled study is to learn if, in addition to nurses, community members can be trained as health coaches to deliver the HealthyLifetime (HL) program to people without complex chronic health conditions, an intervention that provides a short-term and effective health coaching intervention delivered through a virtual platform to improve health, resiliency, and independent self-care to participants who are without complex chronic conditions. The main question it aims to answer is: • Can Community Health Coaches achieve the same level of competency and outcome as Nurse Health Coaches in participants without complex chronic conditions?

The purpose of this study is to develop a cohort of volunteers that can be studied and followed up into the future for changes in health behaviors and development of health problems.

The County Council of Region Skåne, Sweden, has recently initiated Targeted Health Dialogues in primary care. The prevention program includes health dialogues provided by specially trained personnel, collection of clinical and laboratory data as well as questionnaire data on, e.g., individual health and health behaviors. So far, it enrolls all 40-year old Swedish and foreign-born inhabitants in the county and it will also include all 50- and 60-year old persons within a near future. A research project will be integrated within the program where the collected data will be linked, on the individual level, to national and regional data on hospital admissions, clinical diagnoses from specialist clinics and primary care, causes of death, and prescriptions. The individual linkages will also include population data on sociodemographic characteristics, neighborhood of residence and family relations. Blood samples will be collected for analyses of molecular biomarkers. The research project will examine associations between potential predictors and future risk of cardiovascular diseases and other serious diseases, such as cancer, and also whether the effect of the prevention program is modified by these potential predictors. The effect of the intervention will be examined, and whether the protocol needs to be modified in order to develop more precise and personalized medicine.

Arab women present increased risk for diabetes, with a 70% greater risk for adult-onset diabetes and a significantly younger age at onset compared with Jewish Israelis. In fact, the rate of diabetes for Arab women in Jerusalem is 4 times higher compared with their Jewish counterparts. Group lifestyle interventions such as the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) have documented effectiveness in preventing diabetes; however, many fail to demonstrate outcome maintenance. We predict that integrating leadership skills training into the gold standard DPP would improve the long-term outcome maintenance. Stage 1: A pre-post study design will be utilized, where all community participants will be exposed to intervention components. The sample was selected from pre-existing groups in the local community center, based on their leadership potential. phase 2: The second stage of the trial will not include the leadership component, but instead it will incorporate resiliency training and it aims to evaluate the effect of increased resiliency on the main outcomes including improvement in healthy behaviors such as adherence to Mediterranean diet and as well as a reduction in sedentary lifestyle and increased engagement in physical activity. In addition, resiliency training is likely to improve the maintenance of these behaviors.