The Effectiveness of a Healthy Lifestyle in Obese Pediatric Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Child and adolescent obesity represents a significant and escalating health concern in the United States. Notably, Hispanic adolescents face a higher prevalence of obesity and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease compared to their peers from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. This was obtained through systematic investigations in which different approaches were used. Therefore, obesity interventions of long duration, at least one year, and with a beginning phase intensive enough to produce significant early weight loss may be needed for adolescents with obesity. Surprisingly, despite this elevated risk, there is a glaring underrepresentation of Hispanics in obesity intervention studies aimed at youth. It is therefore imperative to develop interventions tailored specifically to overweight adolescents, with a particular focus on the Hispanic population. While researchers have addressed numerous interventions targeting adolescent obesity, many of these initiatives have demonstrated limited treatment efficacy, failed to achieve all desired treatment objectives, experienced high attrition rates, and encountered waning participant engagement. To evaluate the impact of adopting a healthy lifestyle among pediatric patients struggling with obesity, we undertook a comprehensive systematic review of the literature, and with the information obtained from the articles chosen, we will undergo a meta-analysis. Our review encompassed a 10-year span of published literature, drawing upon online databases including the Cochrane Library, PubMed, Web of Science, PubMed Central, and Google Scholar. Our review exclusively considered randomized controlled trials that focused on the effectiveness of various lifestyle modifications for pediatric patients grappling with obesity. We synthesized the pooled incidence, risk ratio, and associated 95% confidence intervals to gauge the efficacy of these interventions, employing the fixed-effect model to account for potential between-study variations rather than the random-effect model. After the calculation of each one of the studies selected, we could conclude that it gave good outcomes after the modification of lifestyle in these patients, giving a statistical significance and p-value in our three representative figures of <0.001.