Sean Seltzer
GM2020
Written assignment
27/11/2017
‘Prevention strategies and stroke’ Disease prevention is one of the major branches of public health, alongside health promotion, and prolonging life [1]. The importance of preventative strategies in medicine is exemplified by their success, saving millions of lives every year [2]. Initially, preventative medicine mainly included vaccination and healthy lifestyle promotion, however the definition has broadened to include not only interventions that avert disease, but interventions that mitigate it in sick individuals as well [3]. As a result, these components of prevention give rise to four classifications:
I. Primordial Prevention: Treats the population with a protective behaviour or intervention …show more content…
Geoffrey Rose in 1985. This notion reveals two fundamental approaches to prevention: the high-risk and the population approach. The latter targets the population as a whole and shifts the curve of a given risk factor to a more favourable distribution. Dr. Rose remarked that population-based prevention strategies can significantly decrease disease burdens even through small shifts in the distribution curve as opposed to the adoption of the superficial “high-risk” approach [6, 7]. The advantages of a population approach is that it is radical, has potential for whole population, and is behaviourally appropriate. Disadvantages include the prevention paradox: individuals experience minimal benefit, requires massively motivated population and healthcare providers, and minimal benefit to risk ratio. Changing the behaviour of a population, however, is not impossible as demonstrated by Finland, a country that successfully decreased its population’s death rate due to cardiovascular disease by 65% in the 1970s through a strong public campaign that changed the country’s dietary habits and lifestyle [8, …show more content…
In the 2015 report on the global burden of stroke it was determined that across 188 countries 25.7 million individuals were stroke survivors, with 6.5 million deaths, for a total of 113 million DALYs in 2013. While there was a dramatic decrease in age-standardized rates of stroke since the beginning of the 1990s, the global incidence of stroke is ever-increasing [11]. Interestingly, it is estimated that 90.5% of the global stroke burden is attributable to three main categories of modifiable risk factors including environment and occupation, metabolic, and behavioural risk factors (see table 1 in Feigin et al. 2016) [12]. Thus, public health policies have an essential role to play in reducing the global burden of stroke and can have a major impact by targeting these three risk factor
GM2020
Written assignment
27/11/2017
‘Prevention strategies and stroke’ Disease prevention is one of the major branches of public health, alongside health promotion, and prolonging life [1]. The importance of preventative strategies in medicine is exemplified by their success, saving millions of lives every year [2]. Initially, preventative medicine mainly included vaccination and healthy lifestyle promotion, however the definition has broadened to include not only interventions that avert disease, but interventions that mitigate it in sick individuals as well [3]. As a result, these components of prevention give rise to four classifications:
I. Primordial Prevention: Treats the population with a protective behaviour or intervention …show more content…
Geoffrey Rose in 1985. This notion reveals two fundamental approaches to prevention: the high-risk and the population approach. The latter targets the population as a whole and shifts the curve of a given risk factor to a more favourable distribution. Dr. Rose remarked that population-based prevention strategies can significantly decrease disease burdens even through small shifts in the distribution curve as opposed to the adoption of the superficial “high-risk” approach [6, 7]. The advantages of a population approach is that it is radical, has potential for whole population, and is behaviourally appropriate. Disadvantages include the prevention paradox: individuals experience minimal benefit, requires massively motivated population and healthcare providers, and minimal benefit to risk ratio. Changing the behaviour of a population, however, is not impossible as demonstrated by Finland, a country that successfully decreased its population’s death rate due to cardiovascular disease by 65% in the 1970s through a strong public campaign that changed the country’s dietary habits and lifestyle [8, …show more content…
In the 2015 report on the global burden of stroke it was determined that across 188 countries 25.7 million individuals were stroke survivors, with 6.5 million deaths, for a total of 113 million DALYs in 2013. While there was a dramatic decrease in age-standardized rates of stroke since the beginning of the 1990s, the global incidence of stroke is ever-increasing [11]. Interestingly, it is estimated that 90.5% of the global stroke burden is attributable to three main categories of modifiable risk factors including environment and occupation, metabolic, and behavioural risk factors (see table 1 in Feigin et al. 2016) [12]. Thus, public health policies have an essential role to play in reducing the global burden of stroke and can have a major impact by targeting these three risk factor