Is A Physician Prescription Enough For Promoting Physical Activity?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More than half of Canadians are not active enough to achieve the health benefits that physical activity (PA) offers. Primary care interventions have been used for addressing inactivity and have been shown to be effective for enhancing PA in adults, especially when using PA prescriptions and referrals to community programs. Yet, more evidence is needed to determine which of these strategies or combination of strategies is most effective for improving adults' PA behaviors. PURPOSE: To compare the effectiveness of a PA prescription plus a referral scheme with a PA prescription alone for improving adults' PA behaviors. METHODS: Ten family physicians (3 females) and 35 female patients (M age = 36.18 years, SD = 4.90) were sampled by convenience from a family medicine clinic located in a mid-size Canadian city. Patients were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Prescription Plus (PP), Prescription Only (PO) and Usual Care (UC). The PP group received a PA prescription plus a referral to a community program, the PO group received just the PA prescription, and the UC group usual health care. Physicians in the PP and PO groups were trained to offer brief PA counseling using the 4-As model and to deliver the PA prescription. Self-reported PA was measured using an adaptation of the Godin Leisure-Time Exercise Questionnaire (Godin & Shephard, 1985) at baseline and eight weeks after patients received the intervention assigned. RESULTS: PA significantly increased from baseline to post-intervention in the PP (M = 42.0, SD = 23.9 vs. M = 59.7, SD = 27.5, p <.05) and the PO (M = 42.2, SD = 21.4 vs. M = 53.2, SD = 32.4, p <.05) groups. These increases were evident for the PP and PO groups whereas the UC group did not show any changes. The observed effect size indicated that the PP group achieved larger increases in PA (d =.70) than did the PO group (d =.40). However, PP and PO groups did not differ significantly. CONCLUSION: Both, the PP and the PO interventions improved participants' self-reported PA behaviors. In terms of cost-effectiveness, it seems that the PO intervention could be preferred given that positive PA outcomes can be achieved with fewer resources.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".