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

Project Information

PREVENT

Grant agreement ID: 101104618

DOI

10.3030/101104618

EC signature date 4 May 2023

Start date 1 July 2023

End date 30 June 2027

Funded under

• Health

Total cost

€ 7 469 250,00

EU contribution

€ 7 469 250,00

Coordinated by

ETHNIKO KAI KAPODISTRIAKO PANEPISTIMIO ATHINON
Greece

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PREVENT (Improving and upscaling primary prevention of cancer by addressing childhood obesity through implementation research - the PREVENT approach)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The PREVENT project ‘Improving and upscaling primary prevention of cancer by addressing childhood obesity through implementation research - the PREVENT approach’ is part of the ‘Prevention and Early Detection of Cancer Cluster’ under the EU Cancer Mission.

Obesity is considered as a global epidemic affecting almost all countries, with trends showing that further increase of the worldwide prevalence is expected in the future. According to the World Health Organization, the global obesity has nearly tripled since 1975. In this context, childhood obesity is a serious problem in Europe, putting children and adolescents at risk for poor health. Childhood obesity is highly related with a range of serious consequences for the health life in childhood and a higher risk of premature death and carcinogenesis in adulthood. According to the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), being overweight or having obesity increases the respective risk of getting more than thirteen types of cancer.

Several clinical trials and studies indicate that early weight control management, especially during childhood and adolescence, have a negative association with an increased cancer risk in adulthood due to the metabolic syndrome. PREVENT proposes multi-actor and context aware primary intervention mechanisms for weight control management in childhood/adolescence to avoid cancer development in the future. The delivered new policies are highly personalized and thus tailored to specific user needs, the cultural environment and the social context since new implementation research actions, such as co-creation, active behavioural change or self-evaluation are foreseen during the Project.

Overall, PREVENT is expected to reduce weight excess by more than 20%, and therefore to play a significant role towards the battle of cancer within Europe. This will be achieved by establishing three different implementation ecosystems across Europe (Greece, Sweden and Catalonia) that they include: i) school communities; ii) healthcare professionals; iii) regional/national policy makers in both healthcare and education; and iv) civil associations with respect to obesity and cancer. The pilot ecosystems increase effectiveness in counselling, provide targeting guidelines and improve upscaling.

PREVENT promotes outreached upscaling activities targeting more than 10.000 schools and more than 3,3 Millions of students of age nine to sixteen-. The project aims to establish a framework of continuous assessment and validation of the new policies towards the development of evidence-based optimised strategies for upscaling and large adoption of the project’s interventions and outcomes.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

WP1 dealing with project management has addressed all the relevant administrative issues of the project.
For WP2 the results are:
• The creation of CoPs in each demo case country as an inter- disciplinary supervising committee,
• A set of health-related indicators of pediatric obesity/overweighting, their quantified values and the type of cancers they are related to in adulthood.
• A set of qualitative and quantitative indicators for the new PREVENT primary interventions and the respective engagement policies.
• A multi-domain and multi-actor gap analysis that identified respective limitations, including implementation cost and social constraints, implementation barriers and the degree of acceptability in current intervention policies.
• indicators on gender distribution (obesity percentage for the sexes), economic factors (family income, region growth and total capital), social attributes (one parent family, family of many children, orphans), regional characteristics (urban or rural) and primary healthcare structure (existence of family doctor, paediatric guidelines, current interventions status) – that will be included in D2.2.
• 2-3 PREVENT multi-actor and context-aware primary interventions for managing obesity and overweight in children and adolescents in each demo case country.
In WP3, we have designed the LLs and provided an initial overview of the engagement strategies from each country node. The adaptation of the digital tools provided by our technical partners (ARBI, ITCL, RISA and WEL) to support the PREVENT interventions in each node has begun.
WP4 is developing a co-creation framework, in which identified relevant end-users are actively engage in activities aimed at the development of implementation guidelines for future users. For the moment, a comprehensive literature review has taken place in order to provide PREVENT with a behavioural model framework that will integrate within PREVENT’s defined multi-actor & context aware interventions (Task 2.4). The behavioural and informational components will be also integrated in the Digital Assistive Engagement tools (T3.3). Finally, the task will be responsible for the parametrisation of the specific adopted interventional protocols in T4.4 and T4.5 based on the characteristics of the defined behavioural change framework.
WP5 and WP6 were both not inittated during this period.
WP7 has set up the legal and ethical framework, including GDPR, for the PREVENT project and will be applied in the pilot sites. In this reporting period it has delivered the Data Management Plan (D7.1) that also included a common cluster chapter, and the PREVENT ethical and regulatory framework of the pilots (D7.2).
The outcomes of WP8 are a strategy plan on communication, dissemination and innovation on the beginning of the project and then the first of periodic reports on dissemination, communication and clustering activities and finally a report about research synergies and open science contribution.
In WP9, an Independent Ethics Advisor is asigned to supervise the whole project and to ensure that all high EU standards on legal and ethics requirements are applied.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Progress 1: A systematic review and meta-analysis was performed according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses updated guidelines from NKUA. The outcome was the identification of 12 distinct indicators as proxies of obesity in childhood or adolescence (for individuals aged <18 years old) which were associated with 22 distinct cancer types in adulthood. See D2.1.

Progress 2: An epidemiological analysis regarding obesity/overweighting during childhood and adolescence throughout Europe and particularly to the PREVENT demo countries is to be delivered. The outcome of this analysis will be a list of current interventions policies for weight control management, at least 5 interventions per demo country, and it will be presented in Deliverable 2.2 ‘The PREVENT multi-actor and context-aware primary interventions based on an epidemiological analysis’ that will be submitted end of February 2025.

Rrogress 3: A multi-domain and multi-actor gap analysis was conducted by EODY and has identified respective limitations, including implementation cost and social constraints, implementation barriers and the degree of acceptability. The domains are a) individual, b) family and peers, c) childcare and school, d) community and built environment, e) society, and f) public policy.

Progress 4: Design of the LLs have been acomplished.

Prevent conference 1

School meals

School meals

Prevent conference