The COPE healthy lifestyles TEEN randomized controlled trial with culturally diverse high school adolescents: baseline characteristics and methods.
Obesity and mental health disorders remain significant public health problems in adolescents. Substantial health disparities exist with minority youth experiencing higher rates of these problems. Schools are an outstanding venue to provide teens with skills needed to improve their physical and mental health, and academic performance. In this paper, the authors describe the design, intervention, methods and baseline data for a randomized controlled trial with 779 culturally diverse high-school adolescents in the southwest United States. Aims for this prevention study include testing the efficacy of the COPE TEEN program versus an attention control program on the adolescents' healthy lifestyle behaviors, Body Mass Index (BMI) and BMI%, mental health, social skills and academic performance immediately following the intervention programs, and at six and 12 months post interventions. Baseline findings indicate that greater than 40% of the sample is either overweight (n = 148, 19.00%) or obese (n = 182, 23.36%). The predominant ethnicity represented is Hispanic (n = 526, 67.52%). At baseline, 15.79% (n = 123) of the students had above average scores on the Beck Youth Inventory Depression subscale indicating mildly (n = 52, 6.68%), moderately (n = 47, 6.03%), or extremely (n = 24, 3.08%) elevated scores (see Table 1). Anxiety scores were slightly higher with 21.56% (n = 168) reporting responses suggesting mildly (n = 81, 10.40%), moderately (n = 58, 7.45%) or extremely (n = 29, 3.72%) elevated scores. If the efficacy of the COPE TEEN program is supported, it will offer schools a curriculum that can be easily incorporated into high school health courses to improve adolescent healthy lifestyle behaviors, psychosocial outcomes and academic performance.
['Melnyk|Bernadette Mazurek|BM|', 'Kelly|Stephanie|S|', 'Jacobson|Diana|D|', 'Belyea|Michael|M|', 'Shaibi|Gabriel|G|', 'Small|Leigh|L|', "O'Haver|Judith|J|", 'Marsiglia|Flavio Francisco|FF|']
D000069:Acculturation D000293:Adolescent D001007:Anxiety D015992:Body Mass Index D003863:Depression D004522:Educational Status D005260:Female D015438:Health Behavior D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice D006304:Health Status D006801:Humans D007398:Interpersonal Relations D008019:Life Style D008297:Male D008603:Mental Health D008960:Models, Psychological D009765:Obesity D050177:Overweight D012944:Social Support D012959:Socioeconomic Factors D015206:Southwestern United States
High school Adolescents Mental health Prevention Overweight RCT