Moving Toward a Precision-Based, Personalized Framework for Prevention Science: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

The goal of this Special Issue is to introduce prevention scientists to an emerging form of health care, called precision medicine. This approach integrates investigation of the mechanisms of disease and health compromising behaviors with prevention, treatment, and cure resolved at the level of the individual. Precision Medicine and its derivative personalized prevention, represents a promising paradigm for prevention science as it accounts for response heterogeneity and guides development of targeted interventions that may enhance program effect sizes. If successfully integrated into prevention science research, personalized prevention is an approach that can inform the development of decision support tools (screening measures, prescriptive algorithms) and enhance the utility of mobile health technologies that will enable practitioners to use personalized consumer data to inform decisions about the best type and/or intensity of a prevention strategy for particular individuals or subgroups of individuals. In this special issue, we present conceptual articles that provide a heuristic framework for precision-based, personalization prevention research and empirical studies that address research questions exemplary of a new generation of precision-based personalized preventive interventions focused on children’s mental health, behavioral health, and education.

Precision Medicine, AI, and the Future of Personalized Health Care

“…71 Recent work has uncovered methods to predict heart failure 72 and other serious cardiac events in asymptomatic individuals. 73 When combined with personalized prevention strategies, 74,75 these models may positively impact disease incidence and sequela. Complex diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, often involve the interplay among gender, genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors.…”

Building Healthy Children: A preventive intervention for high-risk young families

“…Doing so means offering those with less risk factors less intensive (and less costly) interventions, and those at higher risk more intensive (and more costly) interventions. Recently, the field of prevention science has supported the precision approach, calling for interventions that are more tailored to specific client needs (August & Gewirtz, 2019). As part of this call, the field of home visiting has begun actively conducting research on precision home visiting (e.g., Home Visiting Applied Research Collaborative).…”

Measuring parent-adolescent interactions in natural habitats. The potential, status, and challenges of Ecological Momentary Assessment.

“…One child, in this study, realized he was not doing sufficient chores, and started to help unloading the dishwasher. Secondly, in smart-phone applications, EMA could be combined with more precise and timely delivery of interventions [14], [16], [47]. Indeed in other domains, EMA is used to identify risk with more sensitive measures, provide tailored feedback, and identify person-specific targets for intervention [48]- [50].…”