Behavioural interventions as primary prevention for Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) among young people

Expected Outcome

This topic aims at supporting activities that are enabling or contributing to one or several expected impacts of destination “Staying healthy in a rapidly changing society”. To that end, proposals under this topic should aim to deliver results that are directed at, tailored towards and contributing to most of the following expected outcomes:

• Healthcare professionals have access to behavioural interventions that can be used to establish and reinforce healthy habits and sustain behavioural changes.
• Health professionals and educators have access to evidence-based strategies to mitigate risks of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) for youth, with clear metrics that can be used to assess health outcomes.
• Youth have increased individual responsibility through targeted education, digital services, including easily accessible tools for self-monitoring, and community-based support, stemming from increased collaboration between healthcare professionals, educators and families.
• Researchers have access to Real-World Data (RWD)[1], existing health data infrastructure and digital tools, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can contribute to the sustained success of behavioural health interventions.
• Policymakers at local, regional, national and EU levels have new knowledge on behavioural interventions on NCDs among youth, which they can use to improve interventions in diverse European contexts.

Scope

The topic is focused on behavioural interventions for youth, defined as 12 to 25 years old, for the primary prevention of the top NCDs later in life, where “top NCDs” refers to the most prevalent NCDs[2]. For the purpose of this call, NCDs explicitly exclude cancer.

Implementation research should be conducted to implement existing behavioural interventions. These interventions should be evidence-based and have an emphasis on empowerment and self-management (e.g. health literacy, health education, health promotion). As self-monitoring is an essential element of self-management, proposals should include user-friendly hardware and software for efficient self-monitoring (i.e. wearables and point-of-care devices for measuring various physiological parameters and other predictors and other biomarkers and the corresponding apps for easy readout and tracking, possibly also including gamification elements). Hardware and software should be interoperable in line with internationally accepted standards in order to avoid lock-in effects and assure scalability.

Proposals should also include most of the following aspects:

• Ensure that gender-sensitive and intersectional approaches are integrated, addressing potential gender-specific barriers for groups at risk of discrimination, as well as cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and should also outline how digital tools, including AI and RWD and biomarkers (e.g. genomic data, wearables, etc.) or existing relevant administrative dataset, will be integrated to enhance the scalability, personalisation, and effectiveness of interventions in the long-term.
• Present a clear, evidence-based strategy showing how the interventions will be tailored, deployed, and assessed at individual, family, community, and societal levels, while considering social inequalities and lifestyle factors (i.e. nutrition, sleep rhythm) and ensuring a robust methodological framework for evaluating the effectiveness of interventions (e.g. randomised controlled trails, quasi-experimental designs, etc.), with clearly defined indicators of success of the intervention (e.g. biometric markers, psychosocial wellbeing metrics, physical activity change, etc.). Applicants should evaluate unintended consequences for all interventions.
• Include formats that will increase collaboration between healthcare professionals, educators, families, and policymakers in promoting preventive health and should include plans for longer-term follow-up to estimate health impact and cost savings over time. Related to this, applicants should outline how policy changes related to the intervention (e.g. school meal programmes, safe urban infrastructure for exercise, digital literacy campaigns, circadian alignment, stress reduction strategies) can reinforce and scale up successful behavioural interventions, whilst taking into account how they can be replicated or adapted to different cultural, geographic and socio-economic contexts. As such, active involvement of key stakeholders throughout the study is strongly encouraged.

This topic requires the effective contribution of social sciences and humanities (SSH) disciplines and the involvement of SSH experts, organisations as well as the inclusion of relevant SSH expertise, in order to produce meaningful and significant effects enhancing the societal impact of the related research activities.

The proposals should adhere to the FAIR[3] data principles, adopt data quality standards, data integration operating procedures and GDPR[4] compliant data sharing/access good practices developed by the European research infrastructures, where relevant.

Applicants should provide details of their clinical studies[5] in the dedicated annex using the template provided in the submission system. As proposals under this topic are expected to include clinical studies, the use of the template is strongly encouraged.

[1] EMA definition: “Real-World Data are routinely collected data relating to patient health status or the delivery of healthcare from a variety of sources other than traditional clinical trials (e.g. claims databases, hospital data, electronic health records, registries, mhealth data, etc.)”.

[2] The prevalence of a disease is the number of cases in a defined population at a specified point in time. See https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/36838/9241544465.pdf

[3] See definition of FAIR data in the introduction to this Work Programme part.

[4] General Data Protection Regulation: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection_en, https://gdpr-info.eu

[5] Please note that the definition of clinical studies (see introduction to this Work Programme part) is broad and it is recommended that you review it thoroughly before submitting your application.