Translational Behavioral Medicine: a pathway to better health

HEALTH DETERMINANTS/HEALTH PRACTICES Isn’t it time to close the chasm between what we know about health determinants and what we put into practice to improve health [1]? Around the globe, 60% of all deaths are caused by chronic disease [2]. All parts of the world are affected. Eighty percent of chronic disease deaths now occur in lowand middle-income countries [2]. In the United States, nearly 50% of adults live with at least one chronic condition, and those conditions account for 75% of health care costs [3, 4]. The major causes of chronic disease — behavioral, psychosocial, and environmental influences on health— are the subject matter of behavioral medicine [1, 5]. Behavioral medicine is the interdisciplinary field concerned with integrating and applying psychosocial and biomedical knowledge to promote health, prevent disease, andmanage illness. Themission of Translational Behavioral Medicine (TBM), a new journal of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, is to advance the field’s knowledge and actualize it to improve individual and population health. TBM’s editorial board aims to accomplish this by bringing sound, actionable science to practitioners and catalyzing debate on policy issues that surround implementing the evidence. We know that people get sick because of unhealthy behaviors: a poor quality diet, physical inactivity, and tobacco use are the major risk factors for chronic disease around the globe. Eliminating those risks would make it possible to prevent at least 80% of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and 40% of cancers [1, 6]. Adverse psychosocial influences, including depression and work stress, have just as negative effects on health, and they act separately from the harm produced by unhealthy behaviors [7]. We know that people get sicker or fail to recover because they don’t adhere to treatments. In fact, only about 50% of prescribed medications are actually taken [8, 9]. And yet, few countries spend very much money to address behavioral or psychosocial influences on health. The U.S., for example, allocates only 5% of its health care dollars to health promotion/disease prevention [5].