How can healthy ageing programs be conceptualized within the framework of personalized prevention?
S Boccia, S Farina, E Giacobini, R PastorinoAbstract
Issue
Personalised prevention is a multi-faceted field that seeks to use individual information from various domains—lifestyle, health records, social habits, environmental exposures, omics—as safely and effectively as possible. It reflects a shift from age-based, one-size-fits-all approaches towards more dynamic strategies based on a person’s evolving risk profile, biology, and context. Despite its potential, translating this vision into practice remains a key challenge for public health systems, especially in ensuring that such approaches are both effective and equitable across different settings.
Description of the problem
The EU-funded project “PeRsOnalized Prevention roadmap for the future HEalThcare (PROPHET)” aimed to operationalize this vision through evidence mapping, stakeholder consultation, and expert consensus, use to develop a Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) and a Roadmap supporting the implementation of personalised prevention across European health systems.
Results
The SRIA identifies 10 key challenges for the implementation of personalised prevention, while the Roadmap outlines a five-year strategy including 56 goals and 66 actions, structured across different priority levels. These address key areas such as evidence generation, interoperability, real-world uptake, and capacity building. The framework promotes risk stratification integrating omics, clinical history, environmental exposures, and behavior, alongside continuous monitoring enabled by digital tools and biomarkers to anticipate health decline. Thus, social determinants are embedded to ensure feasibility and equity.
Lessons
Conceptualizing prevention in this way enables more adaptive and predictive strategies. Integrating multi-domain data, continuous monitoring, and social determinants is essential to ensure effectiveness and equity. The approach is transferable and highlights the importance of coordinated investment and stakeholder engagement for other countries and settings.