Primary Care Physicians' Action Plans for Responding to Results of Screening Tests Based on the Concept of Quaternary Prevention

Healthy lifestyle status related to alcohol and food addiction risk among college students: a logistic regression analysis

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to determine whether low healthy lifestyle (HL) status was associated with alcohol and food addiction risks among college students.

METHOD

The data were gathered through an online survey questionnaire from 311 college students. The students were divided into either a lower or a higher HL status group, based on HL mean score, and the major statistical method used was a binary logistic regression.

RESULTS

There were significant differences in alcohol and food addiction score between the two groups. The lower HL status group showed a 3.06 times higher risk of problematic drinking and a 2.44 times higher risk of food addiction compared with the higher HL status group.

CONCLUSIONS

The results of this study suggest the importance of HL in the prevention of alcohol and food addiction. HL information can be used to develop health education programs aimed at preventing addiction for college students.

Ethical, pedagogical, socio-political and anthropological implications of quaternary prevention

The concept of quaternary prevention, resulting from a reflection on the doctor-patient relationship, is presented as a renewal of the age-old ethical requirement: first, a doctor must do no harm; second, the doctor must control himself/herself. The origin of the concept, its endorsement by the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA) and the European Union of General Practitioners (UEMO), its dissemination, and the debates to which it has given rise, are presented by a panel of authors from 10 countries. This collective text deals more specifically with: the bioethics of prevention, the importance of teaching Quaternary prevention and factual medicine, the social and political implications of the concept of quaternary prevention, and its anthropological dimensions.

Quaternary prevention: reviewing the concept

Background: According to the Wonca International Dictionary for General/Family Practice Quaternary Prevention is defined as: ‘Action taken to identify patient at risk of overmedicalization, to protect him from new medical invasion, and to suggest to him interventions, which are ethically acceptable.’ The concept of quaternary prevention was initially proposed by Marc Jamoulle and the targets were mainly patients with illness but without a disease.

Objectives: The purpose of this opinion article is to open the debate around a new possible definition and a new conceptual model of quaternary prevention based on the belief that quaternary prevention should be present in physicians’ minds for every intervention they suggest to a patient.

Discussion: The debate around quaternary prevention is vital in the context of contemporary medicine and has expanded worldwide. The human being may suffer harm from medical interventions from conception, during their childhood, during their entire healthy lifetime as well as during a self-limited disease, a chronic disease, or a terminal disease. The current definition of quaternary prevention has limitations because it excludes patients and medical interventions where a quaternary prevention perspective would be needed and useful to protect patients from harm. In this context, a new definition and conceptual model of quaternary prevention is proposed.

Conclusion: In this new proposal, quaternary prevention is defined as an ‘action taken to protect individuals (persons/patients) from medical interventions that are likely to cause more harm than good.’

Shared decision making: relevant concepts and facilitating strategies

As the paradigm in healthcare nowadays is the evidence-based, patient-centered decision making, the issue of shared decision making (SDM) is highlighted. The aims of this manuscript were to look at the relevant concepts and suggest the facilitating strategies for overcoming barriers of conducting SDM. While the definitions of SDM were discordant, several concepts such as good communication, individual autonomy, patient participants, and patient-centered decision-making were involved. Further, the facilitating strategies of SDM were to educate and train physician, to apply clinical practice guidelines and patient decision aids, to develop valid measurement tools for evaluation of SDM processes, and to investigate the impact of SDM.