Abstract
Purpose: To develop a dietary education program for patients with Crohn's disease (CD) aiming to maintain remission and improve their satisfaction with meals, and to examine the effectiveness of the program.
Method: The core of the program consisted of self-monitoring by patients and feedback of evaluation by healthcare providers. The developed program comprised three periods such as baseline, intervention, and follow-up; each period lasted for 8 weeks (total, 24 weeks). Participants were randomly assigned to the experimental group who entered the education program (n=10) or control group (n=11). Both groups filled out questionnaires to measure outcomes every 4 weeks, in total 7 times.
Results: In the experimental group the frequency with which patients tried food increased significantly during the intervention period but decreased significantly during follow-up (p<0.01). The health condition of the experimental group did not become worse. There were no significant differences in participants' satisfaction with meals between the two groups and for each period.
Conclusion: This program helped CD patients to increase the frequency with which they tried food maintaining health condition. The results suggest that the program should incorporate devices to maintain these effects.
