Interventions Promoting Condom Use Among Youth: A Systematic Review

In many European and other high -income, Western countries, condom use has been decreasing among youth. A variety of promotional strategies to increase condom use exists. Our systematic review aimed to identify effective elements in interventions aimed at increasing condom use in youth. We searched databases (2010-2021) for intervention studies promoting condom use among youth in Western, high -income countries. The primary outcome was condom use; the secondary outcome was sexually transmitted infection (STI) diagnoses. Effectiveness per intervention was de fined based on the percentage of comparisons that showed signi ficant increases in condom use and signi ficant decreases in STIs. We compared the effectiveness of interventions for different participant-, intervention- and methodological characteristics. We included 74 papers describing 85 interventions in the review. Overall, the median intervention effectiveness was 33.3% (interquartile range = 0%-66.7%) for condom use and 0% (interquartile range = 0%-10 0%) for STI diagnoses. Intervention effectiveness for condom use was signi ficantly higher in interventions tailored towards females and males speci fically, compared with interventions applied to both sexes combined. Our findings show the dif ficulty in designing effective interventions to increase condom use among youth. Interventions aimed at either females or males were more effective in increasing condom use. (c) 2023 Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY -NC -ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).