Page 135 - Pro-active Management of Women’s Health after Cardiometabolic Complicated Pregnancies

3.3 Preferences for postpartum lifestyle counseling| 133
combination of face-to-face personal counselling, supported by computer- tailored lifestyle advice offered on the Internet, appealed to these women.
Our results show that women, who are at increased cardiovascular and metabolic risk after they have experienced a pregnancy complication, are motivated to participate in postpartum lifestyle interventions. Women reported that they would like to be guided in adopting a healthy lifestyle, and that they would like their lifestyle to be monitored by a health care specialist. This is in line with the window of opportunity for preventive interventions in women after a pregnancy complicated with preeclampsia, intrauterine growth restriction and/or gestational diabetes, as demonstrated earlier1.
To our knowledge, our study is the first to describe preferences for postpartum lifestyle support among women who have experienced preeclampsia, intrauterine growth restriction and/or gestational diabetes. However, we found one other study that investigated preferred types of lifestyle support among women with recent gestational diabetes in order to improve the development of diabetes prevention strategies. The results of this study by Zehle et al182 show that advice from a dietician and telephone support from a health educator were the most preferred forms of health assistance to improve dietary and physical activity habits. The results of our study confirm the conclusion of Zehle et al that dietary change programs, informed by the beliefs and circumstances of this high-risk population, need to be developed182.
The finding that the Internet might be a suitable medium to offer lifestyle counseling supports previous research. It was earlier concluded that the Internet can be a valuable tool to support physicians and nurses in the field of adolescent preventive care247. The use of a combination of face-to-face counseling and computer-tailored counseling is also supported by previous research. In the field of child preventive health care, Internet-tailored fruit and vegetable education