Disease Prevention Flashcards
What is prevention?
Actions aimed at eradicating, eliminating or minimizing the impact of disease and disability or if none of these are feasible, retarding the progress of disease and disability
What is primordial prevention?
Actions and measures that inhibit the emergence of risk factors in the form of environmental, economic, social and behavioral conditions and cultural patterns of living (e.g. eradication of smallpox, eliminating added salt from all foods).
What is primary prevention?
Prevention of diseases before their biological onset. (e.g. exercise, immunization, prophylaxis)
What is secondary prevention?
Early and asymptomatic detection and remediation of certain diseases and conditions that, if left undetected, would likely become clinically apparent and harmful. (e.g. screening)
What is tertiary prevention?
All the measures available to reduce or limit impairments and disabilities, (the physical and social consequences of symptomatic disease) and promote the patients’ adjustment to irremediable conditions. (e.g. physiotherapy after a stroke)
Describe Leavel’s levels of Disease Prevention
- Stage of Disease: Pre-risk –> Level of prevention: Primordial –> Type of response: Disease eradication and elimination
- Stage of Disease: Pre-disease –> Level of prevention: Primary –> Type of response: Health promotion and specific protection
- Stage of Disease: Latent disease –> Level of Prevention: Secondary – Type of Response: Disability limitation for early symptomatic disease, rehabilitation for late symptomatic disease
Where are primordial prevention efforts directed? And what is the main intervention?
- Efforts are directed towards e.g. discouraging children from adopting harmful lifestyles. Changing the conditions in which risk factors occur.
- Main intervention - Through individual and mass education.
What does Primary prevention involve and signify? And how is it accomplished?
- It involves the actions taken prior to onset of disease which removes possibility that the disease will occur.
- It signifies intervention in the pre-pathogenesis phase of a disease or health problem.
- It is accomplished by measures of “health promotion” and “specific protection”.
What are the main parts of health promotion in primary prevention?
- Towards improved nutrition
- Environmental modifications
- Lifestyle and behavioral changes
What are the main parts of specific protection in primary prevention?
- Immunization and seroprophylaxis
- Chemoprophylaxis
- Use of specific nutrients or supplements
- Protecting against occupational hazards
- Safety of drugs and foods
- Control of environmental hazards e.g. air pollution
What specific interventions are adopted in secondary prevention and what does it involve?
Specific interventions
- Early diagnosis e.g. screening tests and case finding programs
- Adequate treatment
It involves actions which halt the progress of a disease at its incipient (asymptomatic) stage and prevents complications.
What does secondary attempt to do?
It attempts to arrest the disease process, restore health by seeking out unrecognized disease and treating it before irreversible pathological changes take place and reverse communicability of infectious diseases.
How does secondary prevention protect others?
It protects others in the community from acquiring the infection and thus provide at once secondary prevention for the infected ones and primary prevention for their potential contacts.
What is the WHO Expert Committee 1973 definition of early detection of health disorders?
The detection of disturbances of homeostatic and compensatory mechanism while biochemical, morphological and functional changes are still reversible.
What is the benefit of early diagnosis?
Thee earlier the disease is diagnosed, and treated the better it is for prognosis pf the case and in the prevention of the occurrence of other secondary cases.
