Health literacy in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic review

Health literacy (HL) is linked to individual capacities of access, understanding, assessment and application of health information to make decisions in everyday life, in order to maintain or improve health. The scope of this article is to review studies on HL conducted in low- and middle-income countries, with an emphasis on the definition used for HL. It involved a systematic search in the Medline, Embase, Scopus, LILACS and SciELO databases. It included studies that showed the definition of HL, studies in countries with low- and middle-income economies and Latin American studies. Initially, a selection of studies was made by reading the titles and/or abstracts. Two independent evaluators conducted the reading of the full text. Disagreements were discussed by consensus. A total of 6,025 references were located and 36 were selected for the final sample. Most studies (58.3%) were from countries on the Asian continent, followed by studies from South American countries (27.8%), including Brazil. Most studies (58.3%) evaluated the functional dimension of the HL (FHL). The most frequent definitions were from the Institute of Medicine and from the World Health Organization. Approximately 30% of the studies that evaluated FHL used broader definitions of HL as theoretical frameworks.