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Beyond data and technology: the need for new thinking to enable the era of precision prevention

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: BACKGROUND: Global flagship initiatives increasingly advocate for proactive health maintenance to alleviate the growing burden on reactive, disease-focused healthcare systems. Precision prevention is conceived as the targeted modulation of causal pathways across the disease continuum, from latent risk and pre-disease states to clinical manifestation, surpassing conventional public health prevention strategies that prioritise managing population-level risk factors. Traditional discovery and implementation models, however, remain poorly aligned with the pace and breadth of scientific and technological advances. This review outlines key barriers to scaling precision prevention and argues for the integration of conceptual, methodological, and policy perspectives into a single implementation‑oriented framework. MAIN: Individualised risk stratification lies at the core of precision prevention. Genomics serves as a stable substrate for lifetime susceptibility assessment, while meaningful prediction in multifactorial chronic disease requires additional risk monitoring using dynamic intermediate molecular markers and high-resolution exposomic data. Machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) methods are increasingly helpful tools for integrating large, heterogeneous and temporally structured real-world data to generate personalised predictions of health trajectories. Trustworthy AI-enabled risk prediction or decision-support systems are expected to provide transparency about model logic, assumptions and performance. In discovery, existing diagnostic classifications and conventional case-control designs can obscure mechanistic heterogeneity. Shifting toward precision phenotyping and biologically grounded disease redefinition could reveal a new layer of molecular understanding. Evidence generation strategies that reflect the temporal change of disease, including high‑risk enrichment, surrogate endpoints, and adaptive, trajectory-based monitoring, are particularly important for common conditions with prolonged latency periods (e.g., cancer, cardiovascular disease). Features often dismissed as "noise", such as stochastic molecular variation and minimal exposures, may in fact encode meaningful individual-level signals and thus merit investigation. CONCLUSION: To shift healthcare from reactive treatment toward proactive health maintenance requires coordinated action from stakeholders to reshape the pillars of discovery, reform outcome assessments and modernise implementation strategies.

Source: BMC Medicine

DOI: 10.1186/s12916-026-04938-1