Yesterday Lydia Kwak defended her PhD thesis at a public meeting at Maastricht University. Her thesis describes the development, implementation and evaluation of an intervention program aiming to contribute to prevention of unnecessary weight gain among employees. Her PhD research was part of the NHS-NRG project, a comprehensive project funded by the Netherlands Heart Foundation on obesity prevention. This project consisted of two studies exploring behavioural, cognitive and environmental determinants of weight gain and energy-balance related behaviours, and three intervention studies; one aimed at adolescents (the Do-IT intervention), one for elderly people (the WAAG-study), and the one Lydia used for her PhD thesis which was called the In-Balance study.
Lydia Kwak used the Intervention Mapping protocol to develop the intervention that consisted of health education, self monitoring and environmental change components. The evaluation study used a controlled design and the results indicated that employees in intervention worksites had a lower fat mass at follow-up than employees of control worksites where the intervention program was not implemented. Her studies also showed the difficulties to convince worksites to participate in such an important study and to convince employees to participate in weight gain prevention activities. Prevention of weight gain should be key in attempts to curb the obesity epidemic, since treatment of obesity is hardly ever successful on the loner run.
Lydia Kwak’s thesis studies have been published in different international scientific journals. See for example:
Lydia Kwak used the Intervention Mapping protocol to develop the intervention that consisted of health education, self monitoring and environmental change components. The evaluation study used a controlled design and the results indicated that employees in intervention worksites had a lower fat mass at follow-up than employees of control worksites where the intervention program was not implemented. Her studies also showed the difficulties to convince worksites to participate in such an important study and to convince employees to participate in weight gain prevention activities. Prevention of weight gain should be key in attempts to curb the obesity epidemic, since treatment of obesity is hardly ever successful on the loner run.
Lydia Kwak’s thesis studies have been published in different international scientific journals. See for example:
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17610944&ordinalpos=9&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17578384&ordinalpos=11&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17241761&ordinalpos=18&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
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