eLENA provides important information on nutrition interventions which is organized in an intuitive, user-friendly manner. Each page covering a nutrition intervention contains the following features:
- Narrative text
- WHO recommendations
- WHO documents
- Evidence
- Cost-effectiveness
- Category of intervention
Intervention pages may also contain:
- Biological, behavourial and contextual (BBC) statement
- Commentary
- Systematic review summary
Narrative text
The narrative text provides very brief background on the intervention as well as the nutrition problem the intervention is designed to address. It generally includes limited biological information as well as one or two key statistics and a brief summary of the evidence of the intervention’s effectiveness.
WHO recommendations
If formal recommendations from WHO are available, they will be clearly presented under this heading. Recommendations can come from guidelines or other guidance documents.
WHO documents
The development of global guidelines and recommendations is one of WHO’s core functions. Where available, links to WHO documents offering relevant guidance are presented for each nutrition intervention. The documents included in this section are grouped into two categories:
GRC-approved guidelines are documents containing formal recommendations that have been recently approved by the WHO Guidelines Review Committee (GRC).
Other guidance documents include guidelines, recommendations, official statements and other documents providing guidance that were established prior to the formation of the GRC or have otherwise not yet been approved by the GRC. Also included here are recommendations and other forms of high-level guidance that have been adopted or endorsed by the World Health Assembly.
Along with the title, the date of publication will be provided for all documents in this section as well as a link to more information about the guideline development process.
Evidence
This section provides links to the evidence supporting the intervention in the form of systematic reviews. The systematic reviews are grouped into three categories.
Systematic reviews used to develop the guidelines are those reviews that provided the scientific evidence from which the recommendations presented in the guidelines were developed. Generally, these systematic reviews have been completed very recently, are limited in number and may have been conducted by the WHO secretariat, commissioned from external sources by WHO or recently deposited into the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. All systematic reviews supporting guidelines use the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) method of evaluating evidence.
If available, additional high quality systematic reviews not used directly in the guideline development process but covering the topic of the intervention will be listed under the subheadings as indicated below.
Related Cochrane reviews are systematic reviews from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews that are relevant to the intervention in question but were not used directly in the development of available guidelines.
(Other) related systematic reviews are high-quality systematic reviews published in peer-reviewed journals that are relevant to the intervention in question but were not used directly in the development of available guidelines.
The Evidence section will be updated on a continual basis, however, due to space limitations not all published evidence on a given topic will be profiled.
Cost-effectiveness
This section provides links to peer-reviewed articles and reports assessing the cost-effectiveness of a wide range of nutrition interventions.
Category of intervention
Interventions in eLENA are grouped into three categories:
Category 1 interventions are interventions for which there are guidelines that have been recently approved by the WHO Guidelines Review Committee (GRC). Category 1 interventions also include those supported by recommendations and other forms of guidance that have been adopted or endorsed by the World Health Assembly.
Category 2 interventions are interventions for which systematic review(s) have been conducted but no recent guidelines are yet available that have been approved by the WHO Guidelines Review Committee.
Category 3 interventions are interventions for which available evidence is limited and systematic reviews have not yet been conducted.
Interventions supported by recently developed WHO guidelines or endorsement by the World Health Assembly will normally not include supplementary content such as a biological, behavioural and contextual rationale or a commentary. All other interventions will generally include both a biological, behavioural and contextual rationale as well as a commentary.
Biological, behavourial and contextual (BBC) statement
The biological, behavioural and contextual rationale statement explains the biological basis for each nutrition intervention. These short summary articles also take into consideration the various behavioural and contextual factors that may impact the effectiveness of the intervention. This information is useful in evaluating potential nutrition interventions for a specific context.
Commentary
Commentaries are summaries of the systematic reviews that currently exist on each topic. They also provide opinion on the relevance of the evidence to under-resourced settings and give practical advice on the implementation of the intervention.
Commentaries are independent articles, written by nutrition experts, programme planners and/or field staff.
Systematic review summary
Systematic review summaries are short summaries of the systematic reviews found in the Evidence section of intervention pages in eLENA. Summaries provide methodological information, key results and conclusions of the authors of the review in a concise, yet detailed format of approximately 1,500 words. Systematic review summaries are being rolled out gradually, beginning with summaries of selected Cochrane reviews. Additional summaries will be posted to eLENA over time.
Systematic reviews with summaries will have a link directly below the bibliographic information labelled “Summary of this review”. Simply click on the link to view the summary.