Methods of Primary Prevention Flashcards
List Methods of Primary Prevention
High risk approach
Population strategy
Describe High risk approach
Identify people with high levels of risk factors (ie high bp) and then offer advice/treatment or preventative measures, hence reducing chance of them getting disease
Advantages of high risk approach
• - Intervention/treatment would be on an individual level
- Intervention may be cost effective
Disadvantages of high risk approach
- Wouldn’t be as useful in disease risk is widely distributed across the population and a significant proportion of people with low risk factors still get the disease
- May be expensive to identify those at high risk (screening etc)
- Could be that the risk factor is a disease also, and they would have already developed the disease (hypertension)
Describe population strategy
Reduce risk factor for the entire population in order to reduce incidence
Advantages of population strategy
- Everybody benefits from this
- Seems more appropriate for some diseases which have a wide distribution across the population
Disadvantages of population strategy
- If the vast majority of incidence cases are those which have high risk factors, then it will not be as helpful
- Offers only a small benefit, so there may be poor motivation by subjects and HCPs
- The benefit:risk ratio needs to be assessed in order to see if is worth it
How do you choose between the two primary prevention methods?
The choice of preferred method depends on how disease risk is distributed at different levels of risk factor. So if most cases of CHD are occurring at extremely high BP, we would favour the high risk strategy.
But if most cases of CHD were occurring at average or lower BP levels, we would favour the population strategy
What is a risk factor?
Anything that distinguishes groups at higher or lower risk of disease, it does not have to be causal!
