Editorial

Framingham, Massachusetts; 1948.

In 1948, the U.S. Congress commissioned this city, chosen for its representativeness of the overall American population, to conduct a follow-up study on a cohort of 5,209 adult subjects. Prior to this study, little or nothing was known about the epidemiology of hypertension and cardiovascular disease. This study turned the very notion of risk factors on its head, and what we now know about the effects of diet, physical exercise or antiaggregant drugs on heart disease stems from this longitudinal study, which is still ongoing and now concerns the third generation of subjects...

Prevention has finally become a major medical cause, and concerns both communicable, infectious diseases, as well as non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and cancer.

Prevention concerns populations, and it is those populations that prevention campaigns are aimed at. Because prevention studies accumulate a huge amount of data, it is then possible to run artificial intelligence tools and use these global data to deduce individual risk factors. The focus then shifts from prevention to prediction.

The 2024 Harvey Cushing Symposium, entitled "From prevention to prediction: algorithms for better health", aims to delve into this universe and its components. From cardiovascular and metabolic diseases to cancer, from health check-ups to ageing detection, from tobacco control to vaccination, from algorithms to digital twins, we now have powerful tools to live better, longer, and healthier. It is this personalized medicine, tailored to each of us, that this symposium will explore, drawing on French and American insights thanks to the participation of the American Universities of Columbia Irving Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medicine.

Gérard Friedlander