I’m signing up for this – a low-cost program for maintaining weight loss. That’s what our DGIM researchers learned and published February 21, 2017, online in the prestigious medical journal, the Annals of Internal Medicine. The senior author, Dr. Will Yancy, Jr., is joined by 8 others from Duke, plus one formerly from Duke, the paper’s first author, Dr. Corinne Voils.
Citation:
Corrine I. Voils, PhD; Maren K. Olsen, PhD; Jennifer M. Gierisch, PhD; Megan A. McVay, PhD; Janet M. Grubber, MSPH; Leslie Gaillard, MPH, RD; Jamiyla Bolton, MS; Matthew L. Maciejewski, PhD; Elizabeth Strawbridge, MPH, RD; William S. Yancy, Jr., MD, MHS. Maintenance of Weight Loss After Initiation of Nutrition Training: A Randomized Trial. Published at Annals.org on February 2017. [Link]
What did they do?
The trial was sponsored by the VA HSR&D. They recruited 222 patients who had lost weight and randomly assigned half to receive usual care and half to a maintenance intervention. For the intervention, beginning with in-person delivery, shifting to telephone contact and actually dropping contact in the final 14 weeks, the trial helped participants adopt skills so that they could continue independently with maintenance of weight loss.
And the results were...
Over the 56 weeks, the study demonstrated statistically significant lower weight regain in the intervention compared to usual care – 1.5 lb in intervention group versus 5 lb in the usual care group.
Tips for us
Looks like it’s important to weigh regularly and to plan for situations where we may backslide. We should focus on the good things about weight loss that happened to us.
These researchers acknowledge the study limitations, for example: what is the longer term durability? What’s an optimal strategy? This was the VA, what about women? How can we improve reliability and validity of self-reporting? However, many strengths of the study help forward this science: a strong efficacy design, high retention rates, even script standardization ready to program in implementation software. And, best yet, a low-cost intervention.
On February 25, 2017, the Altmetrics score for this publication was 199.
Of 14 news outlets reporting, these are notable: Medscape, MSN, CNN, and TIME
Post submitted by MB Adams, MD, a frequent contributor to DGIM eNews