topic Hightech Strategy

Prevention

It is popular wisdom that prevention is the best medicine. A BMBF research programme launched in 2003 sets out to discover why, and to what extent, prevention helps to improve people's health and quality of life.

Changing living conditions have led to a significant increase in chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, obesity, degenerative muscular and skeletal diseases as well as mental disorders.

The incidence and progress of chronic illnesses are strongly linked to individual behaviour and the social and physical environment. Very often, people's behaviour cannot be changed without changing their lifestyle, which in turn is strongly connected to their circumstances in life. This insight has led to the establishment of primary prevention as an important priority in statutory health insurance.

One of the goals of prevention and health promotion is to increase individual responsibility, to avoid the need for early retirement and to maintain and strengthen the quality of life and performance levels well into old age. That is why preventive medicine should be added to the health care system as a fourth pillar. However, there is a lack of quality-assured measures which focus on the right target groups.

It is vitally necessary to develop instruments, methods and innovative concepts for the evaluation and quality assurance of measures for primary prevention and health promotion. For this reason, the BMBF established a funding priority in the area of prevention funding in 2003. Within the framework of the first announcement in 2003, the BMBF funded innovative projects in the field of interdisciplinary, application-oriented prevention research that aimed at developing prevention measures and programmes and evaluating and providing quality assurance for these measures. The target groups for these measures and analyses are children and adolescents as well as middle-aged adults.

The second announcement was published in 2005, focusing exclusively on children and young people between the ages of 3 and 25. The third announcement, which was published in 2006, concentrated on the target group of people aged 50 and over. Research organizations working in the area of primary prevention and health promotion are taking part in these research endeavours, thus ensuring that the measures are realized and implemented on a broad basis. The fourth announcement, which is aimed explicitly at the target group of "People in difficult social conditions", was published in July 2007.

In total, the BMBF is providing approximately 20 million Euro to prevention research.

• topic Research

  Prevention Research - Data and Facts

  Research on the promotion of health and the prevention of illnesses was previously situated within the subsidisation focus of "Public Health". However, additional research needs exist with regard to directing prevention measures toward specific target groups in society that are increasingly affected by unequally distributed health prospects. Precisely these population groups are not only affected particularly severely by (chronic) illnesses, they also exhibit underdeveloped health behaviours and attitudes.
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