Equity‐specific effects of interventions to promote physical activity: The application of a newly developed re‐analysis strategy

Purpose Interventions to promote physical activity (PA) may unintentionally increase health inequalities. Thus, equity-specific intervention effects should be analyzed. Our previous systematic review, however, found that the potential for analyzing equity-specific intervention effects has not yet been fully exploited. This study tried out a newly developed re-analysis strategy for analyzing equity-specific effects of PA interventions.

Methods The re-analysis strategy was tried out in a collaboration of a convenience sample of 8 European PA intervention studies in adults aged ≥45 years. Criteria for harmonizing 1) the definitions of outcome, exposure and indicators of inequality, and 2) modeling strategies across studies were established via meetings (face-to-face and online) and e-mail. Interactions between the intervention and inequality indicators on moderate-to-vigorous PA were analyzed using multivariable linear regression. The interactions were pooled using random-effects meta-analysis.

Results The collaborative experience shows that the novel re-analysis strategy can be applied to analyze equity-specific effects of PA interventions. We found no consistent pattern of equity-specific intervention effects across the 8 studies. The pooled estimates indicated that intervention effects did not differ by gender (n = 5321, 8 studies), education (n = 5321, 8 studies), income (n = 933, 2 studies), area deprivation (n = 1802, 3 studies), and marital status (n = 5341, 8 studies).

Conclusions The systematic application of our strategy may help enlarge the limited evidence on equity-specific effects of PA interventions which is a prerequisite for the design of future interventions most likely to reduce health inequalities.

Publication History

Article published online:
02 September 2021