Flinders University

About: Flinders University is a education organization based out in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Health care. The organization has 12033 authors who have published 32831 publications receiving 973172 citations. The organization is also known as: Flinders University of South Australia.

A systematic review of the effectiveness of promoting lifestyle change in general practice.

Abstract: BACKGROUND There is increasing evidence that particular lifestyle behaviours increase the risk of disease and it is widely argued that GPs are ideally placed to encourage patients to modify their behaviour in these areas and thereby reduce their disease risk. There is therefore a need for evidence that GP-based lifestyle interventions are effective in eliciting behaviour change. As there has been no comprehensive attempt to review the literature on this subject, we chose to conduct a systematic review, incorporating meta-analytic techniques where possible, to address this need. OBJECTIVES This study aimed to examine how effective lifestyle advice provided by GPs is in changing patient behaviour. The following four areas of behaviour were examined: smoking, alcohol consumption, diet, and exercise. METHOD The review was restricted to English-language reports of trials which investigated the effectiveness of lifestyle advice provided in a general practice setting. Studies were included where it could be established that subjects were randomly allocated to experimental groups and where a comparison was made between either a "no intervention' or "usual care' control group, or between advice of differing intensities. Six electronic databases were searched and a total of 37 trials were selected for inclusion in the review. Meta-analytic techniques were employed to analyse the data from the smoking advice trials. The results form the trials concerned with the other three behaviours did not lend themselves to this form of analysis. Outcome data were extracted from these trials and summarized in tabular form. RESULTS The results of this review suggest that whilst many of the general practice-based lifestyle interventions show promise in effecting small changes in behaviour, none appears to produce substantial changes. CONCLUSION There is a need for more extensive and rigorous research in this area before substantial public funds are committed to general practice-based health promotion. Furthermore, it is clear that if general practice-based interventions are to be effective in a public health sense, a greater number of GPs will need to become involved in promoting behaviour change than the literature suggests is currently occurring.

Performance measures of 16- to 86-year-old males and females on the auditory verbal learning test

Abstract: This study reports Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT) data for 153 adults in age groups spanning seven decades, with approximately equal numbers of males and females and matched for intelligence, education, and occupation. Overall performance deteriorated with increased age, females performing better than males. Older subjects recalled fewer words, were more susceptible to information overload during input, showed diminished retrieval efficiency, and had a decline in memory for the source of items. In contrast, rate of learning, forgetting over 20-min, monitoring of recall, and interference effects remained stable across the age range.

Media exposure, body dissatisfaction and disordered eating: television and magazines are not the same!

Abstract: Objective: This study aimed to investigate the relationship between media exposure and body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in a more finely grained way than in previous studies. Method: A sample of 104 female undergraduate students completed measures of both magazine and television exposure, as well as measures of body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, awareness and internalization of societal ideals. Results: While both media exposure variables were correlated with body dissatisfaction, the pattern of correlations was very different with the other variables. In particular, the amount of magazine reading, but not television watching, was positively correlated with internalization of thin ideals. On the other hand, time spent watching television was negatively correlated with awareness of sociocultural ideals and self-esteem. Discussion: It was concluded that the processes through which television and magazines impact on body dissatisfaction are different. The relationship between magazine exposure and body dissatisfaction is mediated by internalization of thin ideals, which is not the case for television exposure. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.