Twenty-six intervention studies were identified and evaluated, updating a previous systematic review which categorized interventions targeting: (1) stressors, (2) coping, or (3) appraisal.
To provide focus, in their overview of reviews, van Dulmen and colleagues have described theoretical approaches to adherence and categorized interventions on patient adherence for different medical conditions [ 17].
A model employing continuous exposure was chosen a priori over a simple model categorizing intervention intervals as high and low outdoor air supply because a continuous model with appropriate lags does not require elimination of data from wash-out periods at the start of each interval, and allows for differences between successive high (or low) interventions.
There is some doubt about this way of categorizing interventions, as some control-based interventions may also change agents' underlying associations and some association-based interventions may also promote control (Stewart & Payne 2008; Mendoza et al. 2010).
In that review, the authors constructed a simple temporal taxonomy to categorize interventions into pre-discharge, post-discharge, and "bridging" interventions.
One might argue that all members of the committee had an inclination to prefer to categorize interventions as level II, simply based on their own positions as PED physicians.
The stress interventions were categorized into interventions that: (a) increase cognitive loading and/or emotional stress, (b) increase work pace, and (c) increase precision demands.
Therefore, to synthesize the range of different types of interventions, we categorized the interventions in primary articles into six broad types (see Table 3).
We have categorized each intervention by the pathway(s) from Figure 1 on which it primarily focuses (e.g. PW2 and PW8).
Using the synthesis tables, three reviewers each independently categorized the intervention studies by the U.S. Community Guide categories and categories specific to the Latin American review (Appendix A, available online at www.ajpmonline.org) and screened the studies for inclusion in a full abstraction process to assess the strength of the evidence.
