Effectiveness of multiple eHealth-delivered lifestyle strategies for preventing or intervening overweight/obesity among children and adolescents: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the effect of multiple eHealth-delivered lifestyle interventions on obesity-related anthropometric outcomes in children and adolescents.

METHODS

The Medline ( PubMed), Embase, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, CBM, VIP, CNKI, and Wanfang electronic databases were systematically searched from their inception to March 18, 2022, for randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Meta-analyses were performed to investigate the effect of multiple eHealth-delivered lifestyle interventions on obesity-related anthropometric outcomes (body mass index [BMI], BMI Z-score, waist circumference, body weight, and body fat%). Two independent investigators reviewed the studies for accuracy and completeness. All included studies were evaluated using the Cochrane Risk-of-Bias (ROB) Tool.

RESULTS

Forty trials comprising 6,403 patients were selected for the meta-analysis. The eligible trials were published from 2006 to 2022. Compared with the control group, the eHealth-intervention group was more effective in reducing BMI (weighted mean difference [WMD] = -0.32, 95% confidence interval [CI]: -0.50 to -0.13, = 85.9%), BMI Z-score (WMD = -0.08, 95% CI: -0.14 to -0.03, = 89.1%), waist circumference (WMD = -0.87, 95% CI: -1.70 to -0.04, = 43.3%), body weight (WMD = -0.96, 95% CI: -1.55 to -0.37, = 0.0%), and body fat% (WMD = -0.59, 95% CI: -1.08 to -0.10, = 0.0%). The subgroup analysis showed that parental or school involvement (WMD = -0.66, 95% CI: -0.98 to -0.34), eHealth-intervention duration of >12 weeks (WMD = -0.67, 95% CI: -0.96 to -0.38), and mobile-based interventions (WMD = -0.78, 95% CI: -1.13 to -0.43) had a significantly greater intervention effect size on BMI.

CONCLUSIONS

This review recommends that multiple eHealth-delivered lifestyle strategies may be useful for preventing or treating overweight and obesity among children and adolescents. However, our results should be cautiously interpreted due to certain limitations in our study.