Page 67 - Pro-active Management of Women’s Health after Cardiometabolic Complicated Pregnancies

pregnancy complications were found, a broader search, focusing on the effects of postpartum lifestyle interventions on weight loss, smoking cessation, and smoking relapse in unselected women was conducted using the following terms: puerperium or postpartum period or postpartum or postpartum and lifestyle or life style or risk reduction behavior or risk reduction behavior or health promotion or smoking cessation or weight loss or weight reduction or smoking relapse prevention. Articles retrieved from this search were copied to a reference library (EndNote) and duplicates, if any, were deleted.
Selection Procedure
First, the titles and abstracts of the retrieved articles were screened and labeled in EndNote. Articles were excluded when they were not written in the English language, when non-human research was described, when the study was not an original research article (e.g., a review article), when the study did not deal with the postpartum period, and when the study did not describe the effect of a lifestyle intervention.
Second, the full texts of the remaining articles were examined. Additionally, a manual search of the reference lists of these articles was conducted. We included original research articles describing effects of postpartum lifestyle interventions that were initiated up to 1 year after delivery. Only articles that described the effects of postpartum lifestyle interventions for weight loss, smoking cessation, and smoking relapse prevention were included, since they address the established cardiovascular risk factors of overweight/obesity and smoking. Articles on the effects of lifestyle interventions on other outcome measures (e.g., fruit and vegetable intake or physical activity) were excluded, since our focus was on the effect of lifestyle interventions for established modifiable cardiovascular risk factors only. Furthermore, studies
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