Psychological interventions aiming for changing dietary habits in patients with cardiovascular disease: A systematic...

Diet is a critical component of healthy lifestyle, especially in cardiac rehabilitation. Psychological interventions, as well as mix-treatment interventions, such as psychological components, appear promising approaches in the adoption and maintenance of a healthy diet in patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD). Given the variety of clinical intervention programmes available, we aimed to determine whether psychological interventions and interventions that incorporate psychological components provide better lifestyle outcomes than traditional care, specifically targeting dietary outcomes, and what types of psychological or mix-treatment interventions are more likely to benefit patients with CVD.

A systematic literature search was performed using MEDLINE (PubMed), Scopus, Cochrane Library and PsycINFO to identify interventional studies, published from 2012 to 2022, written in English, evaluating psychological and mix-treatment intervention programmes for dietary outcomes in patients with CVD. In total, 33 intervention studies (n = 5644 patients) were retrieved and analysed using fixed and random effects models.

No significant effect of the psychological intervention was observed regarding fruit and vegetable intake (Hedge's g = +1.06, p = 0.766), whereas a significant reduction was observed in alcoholic beverage consumption in the intervention group, as compared to the control group (Hedge's g = -7.33, p < 0.001). However, based on both our qualitative and quantitative analyses, psychological and mix-treatment interventions were more effective than traditional models in dietary modification. Also, the majority of effective interventions were psychological over mixed-treatment interventions.

Findings add to the growing evidence suggesting that specific psychological interventions may be effective approaches in dietary modification for patients with CVD, potentially forming part of public health agenda.