Shifting from short-term to long-term prevention of cardiovascular disease

Dr Jedidiah Morton, Monash University

Postdoctoral Fellowship

Years funded: 2025 - 2026

Transforming how we prevent cardiovascular disease

Planning and implementing major changes in clinical practice requires a strong, evidence-based justification for doing so. My research vision is to provide such a justification for transforming the approach to the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) from late, reactive prevention to early, proactive prevention.

A lifetime risk approach to proactive, personalised prevention

Most approaches to prevention of CVD focus only on a short-term period just before disease onset, missing out on all the potential benefits of intervening earlier in life. Indeed, current clinical tools for prevention are based on short-term techniques that effectively ignore disease biology.

Therefore, in this project, I will provide the evidence for transforming the approach to prevention of CVD by: developing a novel epidemiological model of CVD that incorporate decades of evidence of disease biology; using this model to build a personalised lifetime risk calculator that also links to the most effective modifiable risk factors to target for an individual; demonstrating the utility of the model and risk score by estimating the clinical and health economic benefits of several lifestyle and pharmacological prevention approaches from early in life; and liaising with stakeholders and consumers to optimise the design of the risk score outputs and deliver it to the Australian public.