Rationale and Design of Family-Based Approach in a Minority Community Integrating Systems-Biology for Promotion of Health (FAMILIA).

BACKGROUND: The 2020 American Heart Association Impact Goal aims to improve cardiovascular health of all Americans by 20% while reducing deaths from cardiovascular disease and stroke by 20%. A large step toward this goal would be to better understand and take advantage of the significant intersection between behavior and biology across the entire life-span. In the proposed FAMILIA studies, we aim to directly address this major knowledge and clinical health gap by implementing an integrated family-centric health promotion intervention and focusing on the intersection of environment and behavior, while understanding the genetic and biologic basis of cardiovascular disease. METHODS: We plan to recruit 600 preschool children and their 600 parents or caregivers from 12-15 Head Start schools in Harlem, NY, and perform a 2:1 (2 intervention/1 control) cluster randomization of the schools. The preschool children will receive our intensive 37-hour educational program as the intervention for 4 months. For the adults, those in the "intervention" group will be randomly assigned to 1 of 2 intervention programs: an "individual-focused" or "peer-to-peer based." The primary outcome in children will be a composite score of knowledge (K), attitudes (A), habits (H), related to body mass index Z score (B), exercise (E), and alimentation (A) (KAH-BEA), using questionnaires and anthropometric measurements. For adults, the primary outcome will be a composite score for behaviors/outcomes related to blood pressure, exercise, weight, alimentation (diet) and tobacco (smoking; Fuster-BEWAT score). Saliva will be collected from the children for SNP genotyping, and blood will be collected from adults for RNA sequencing to identify network models and predictors of primary prevention outcomes. CONCLUSION: The FAMILIA studies seek to demonstrate that targeting a younger age group (3-5 years) and using a family-based approach may be a critical strategy in promoting cardiovascular health across the life-span.

NEW: network-enabled wisdom in biology, medicine, and health care.

Complete repertoires of molecular activity in and between tissues provided by new high-dimensional "omics" technologies hold great promise for characterizing human physiology at all levels of biological hierarchies. The combined effects of genetic and environmental perturbations at any level of these hierarchies can lead to vicious cycles of pathology and complex systemic diseases. The challenge lies in extracting all relevant information from the rapidly increasing volumes of omics data and translating this information first into knowledge and ultimately into wisdom that can yield clinically actionable results. Here, we discuss how molecular networks are central to the implementation of this new biology in medicine and translation to preventive and personalized health care.