Improving and upscaling primary prevention of cancer by addressing childhood obesity through implementation research - the PREVENT approach

PREVENT improves upscaling of primary interventions for weight control management during childhood and adolescence to reduce cancer risks in adulthood. This relies on current evidence that relates excess body weight with increased cancer risk. Towards this end, PREVENT applies a series of implementation research actions in the following directions.

First, it identifies barriers to current interventions and policies preventing them from upscaling to different geographical, socio-economic, and cultural settings.

Then, it introduces new multi-actor and context-aware interventions along with new user engagement strategies to face the current upscaling bottlenecks; multi-actor in the sense that they target different types of users (e.g., students, family, educators, policymakers) and context-aware in the sense that PREVENT interventions are tailored to the specific implementation places (class, canteen, sports fields, labs, outside school).

The PREVENT new policies are adapted, piloted, and scaled up within the schools’ communities of three European countries facing different epidemiological settings on childhood obesity, geographic, socio-economic and cultural attributes.

The pilots are designed to be holistic end-to-end ecosystems, including users, medical professionals, policymakers, public authorities, and civil communities.

They focus on the whole school communities of Greece, Sweden, and Spain-Catalonia, that is, PREVENT outreach to more than 3.3 million students, required for guideline provisioning, large-scale implementation, multi-parameter assessment, and scaling-up.

Co-creation, active behavioral change, self-evaluation through user empowerment, motivational interviewing, social innovation, digital-assistive engagement, health apps, and multi-domain assessment are implementation research aspects of PREVENT to advance user acceptability and compatibility with existing policies, and thus improve sustainability and upscaling.

This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on ""Prevention and Early Detection"".