Eliana Perrin, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Primary Care and general pediatrician at the Harriet Lane Clinic at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, describing results of a study addressing childhood obesity. Published in JAMA, the study shows that adding text messaging and other electronic feedback to traditional in-clinic health counseling for parents — with information about feeding habits, playtime and exercise — helps prevent very young children from developing obesity and potentially lifelong obesity-related problems.

In an earlier study, also co-led by Perrin, investigators demonstrated that the Greenlight program, a “health literacy-informed” primary care-based intervention that Perrin and colleagues at other medical centers developed for parents, improved healthy growth of newborns until 18 months of age, but they found that improvements were not sustained at age 2.

In an effort to extend the improvements through 2 years of age, when pediatrics office visits become less frequent, the new study focused on using digital technology to reinforce elements of the Greenlight program, which previously only consisted of written materials and health counseling during primary care visits. The study was co-led by investigators at Vanderbilt and five other academic medical institutions.