Face-it: A Health Promotion Intervention for Women With Prior Gestational Diabetes and Their Families - A Randomised Controlled Trial

Face-it: A Health Promotion Intervention for Women with Prior Gestational Diabetes and their Families

AIM: The aim of the Face-it project is to increase quality of life and reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes (T2DM) among women with prior gestational diabetes mellitus (pGDM) and their families.

BACKGROUND: Women with pGDM are at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Partners and offspring of women with GDM are also at elevated risk of developing type 2 diabetes and related cardiometabolic conditions. Thus, not only are women with prior GDM at high risk of T2DM and related cardiometabolic conditions, their children and spouses are as well. Since the cumulative incidence of T2DM increases substantially within the first five years after delivery (Kim et al. 2002) there is a strong interest in identifying feasible and effective interventions in this time-period. Evidence from the state-of-the-art Diabetes Prevention Program suggests that intensive lifestyle intervention can reduce the risk of T2DM among women with pGDM (Ratner et al. 2008). However, sustainable changes in such behaviours are difficult and many women do not follow lifestyle recommendations after delivery (Stage et al. 2004). Given the highly elevated risk in this group, this is a substantial missed opportunity for health promotion aimed at prevention of T2DM for not only the mother, but the entire family. It is vital that efforts are based on a thorough understanding of the barriers to health promoting behaviours and involve carefully tailored solutions to overcome these barriers. The investigators hypothesise that a health promotion intervention that focuses on enhancing motivation, health literacy, action competences and social involvement in women with pGDM and their families will reduce diabetes risk and improve quality of life.

DESIGN: Face-it is a two-arm parallel-group randomised clinical trial with women as the unit of randomization comparing a health promotion intervention with a usual care control group.

PARTICIPANTS, RECRUITMENT AND ELIGIBILIGY: Women with pGDM will be recruited from obstetric departments at Aarhus University Hospital (AUH), Odense University Hospital (OUH) or Rigshospitalet (RH) around 24-40 weeks of pregnancy by a health care professional. To be eligible for enrolment into the study, women should also be able to provide written informed consent in Danish. Exclusion criteria is that the participants may not be participating in other postpartum intervention trials with a possible impact on the Face-it trial. Women with diabetes identified at baseline will be excluded. Partners of women and the new-born offspring are also invited to participate in the study. Informed consents are obtained from 1) woman and new-born offspring, including permission to obtain information from the medical record and blood samples for research biobank (woman only), 2) from partner, including blood samples for research biobank. A separate consent 3) is obtained for collection of blood for future biobank. In case of non-participation in the study, women are asked for consent to collect information from the medical record including health characteristics of woman and offspring related to pregnancy and birth.