Parental perspectives on Children's lifestyles: A Path for school health promotion.

The National School Health Program in Portugal advocates for healthy lifestyles. However, school health teams mostly focus their activities on educating children, whereas it is the families who are primarily responsible for managing children's lifestyles. Although the programme proposes interactive health education activities, such as meetings with the children's families, few parents participate in these activities. The project Gostar de Mim was created to bridge this gap by promoting healthy family lifestyles in school settings. The project used an evaluating instrument called the 'Parents' Booklet' packed with information. This study assessed the usefulness of the booklet in providing health information and planning family engagement. Based on the PRECEDE-PROCEED framework (PRECEDE: Predisposing, Reinforcing, and Enabling Constructs in Educational/Environmental Diagnosis and Evaluation; PROCEED: Policy, Regulatory, and Organizational Constructs in Educational and Environmental Development), this article focuses on the social and epidemiological assessment phases. We examined the health surveillance status of children aged 6-10 years (epidemiological phase) and description of health behaviours in different lifestyle dimensions (behavioural and environmental phase). The Parents' Booklet was used to identify parents' perspectives on their children's lifestyles. Data analysis of 568 Parents' Booklet (23 schools) use cases showed that the lifestyle priorities, in order, were 'sleep and rest' (95.6 %), 'energy balance' (100 %), 'oral/body healthcare' (95.6 %), 'alcohol, tobacco/other drugs' (73.9 %), 'consumerism' (91.3 %), 'leisure-time occupation' (91.3 %), and 'literacy and satisfaction at school' (86.9 %). Clearly, the Parents' Booklet was useful, as it made it possible to obtain information that allowed for participatory school health diagnosis and can guide community nursing actions that need to be developed in schools. Crucially, this tool can be useful for parents, enabling them to be more aware of their children's lifestyle via self-monitoring as well as increasing their participation in health education.

Integrative medicine in anxiety disorders.

Anxiety disorders are a current public health issue, as an estimated 16.5% of the Portuguese population suffers from this condition. The goal of this descriptive study was to analyze the efficiency of the treatment of integrative medicine (acupuncture and therapeutic massage) to reduce anxiety disorders and to describe the sociodemographic characteristics of Integrative Medicine Institute (IMI) patients. To this end, a documental analysis from the data base of the clinical reports of IMI was performed, with the approval of the Ethics Committee of the Health Sciences Research Unit with informed consents being signed by all patients. Between January and August 2017, 259 IMI patients were treated. Of these, 30,5% had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Ten sessions of Integrative Medicine (IM) using acupuncture techniques combined with therapeutic massage were applied. Each session consisted of an initial treatment of acupuncture for 30 min, followed by a therapeutic massage for another 30 min. Before starting all 10 treatments, anxiety levels were measured by a self-perception 5 points scale. Anxiety levels were also assessed at the end of the 5th and the 10th treatment. It was found that 75.29% of the patients looking for IM were female and 34.4% were professionals working in intellectual and scientific activities. Patients taking anxiolytic medication presented higher levels of anxiety in comparison with non-medicated ones (p = 0.000). After a maximum of ten treatments (acupuncture combined with massage), the levels of anxiety were reduced (98.39% after five sessions). Women at their tenth treatment reached lower anxiety levels than those of men. The therapies used are proved to be efficient and can be used as a complementary care to treat and relief the symptoms of anxiety disorders. This research is the basis for designing a future randomized control trial study of acupuncture efficiency in the treatment of anxiety disorders.

Acupuncture and electroacupuncture for anxiety disorders: A systematic review of the clinical research.

Anxiety disorders are one of the most common mental health concerns with a major contribution to the global burden of disease. When not treated, anxiety can be aggravated to more serious and complicated health problems. Pharmacology and psychotherapy stand for the conventional treatment for anxiety disorders but these present limited efficacy, especially in the case of chronic anxiety, with high relapse rates and often causing adverse side effects. Clinical research studies render acupuncture as a valid treatment therapy for anxiety disorders without significant adverse effects. The objective of this paper is to review the literature on the effectiveness of acupuncture and electroacupuncture for the treatment of patients with anxiety disorders in order to find strong scientific evidence for its regular practice in Western culture. The systematic review of the clinical research was focused on published clinical trials (controlled, randomized and non-randomized) regarding the treatment of anxiety with acupuncture. Only clinical trials where anxiety was treated as the therapeutic target, and not as a secondary measurement or being associated with other health condition or disease, were considered. Two authors extracted the data independently and exclusion and inclusion criteria were set. The search rendered 1135 papers addressing anxiety as a primary therapeutic target. After review, 13 papers were identified to match exclusion and inclusion criteria and were selected for this analysis. Methodology, design, and quality of the research were highly variable and are discussed and compared. Overall, there is good scientific evidence encouraging acupuncture therapy to treat anxiety disorders as it yields effective outcomes, with fewer side effects than conventional treatment. More research in this area is however needed.