People who have hypertension and shop for groceries online participated in a randomized controlled trial called SaltSwitch Online Grocery Shopping. For a study, researchers sought to investigate the practicability, acceptability, and efficacy of a novel intervention for reducing the amount of salt consumed and blood pressure in people with hypertension. The intervention uses a custom web browser extension that communicates with the online store of a major retailer. This extension highlighted and interpreted the sodium content of individual products and suggested alternatives that were comparable but contained less salt. The primary outcome of interest was a change in mean systolic blood pressure at 12 weeks between people who were randomly assigned (1:1) to either the intervention or control (normal online shopping) groups. The secondary outcomes were diastolic blood pressure, spot urine sodium and potassium ratio, sodium consumption, and food intake. The execution of the intervention and any lessons that might be applied to its further use will be evaluated utilizing a mixed methods process evaluation. Participants with hypertension who bought a lot of salty food online and did their grocery shopping online were the type of people investigators were looking for. After allowing for a 10% dropout rate and assuming a standard deviation of 15 mm Hg, a target sample size of 1,966 provides 80% power (2-sided alpha=0.05) to detect a difference in systolic blood pressure of 2 mm Hg between groups. This was based on the assumption that the standard deviation was 15 mm Hg. This experiment would offer evidence of a new intervention that could lower hypertensive individuals’ salt intake and blood pressure. The intervention took into account the preferences of each person by promoting long-term transitions to goods that were comparable but contained less salt. If the intervention were successful, it would be simple and inexpensive to scale up by utilizing pre-existing online retail environments.
Source – sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002870322001314
