The development of the obesity epidemic can be conceptualized as a shifting population distribution of BMI.
Population-wide interventions to promote less salt-intake in the population will shift the population distribution of blood pressure to lower levels.
Efforts to shift the population distribution of muscle strength and CRF upwards are therefore likely to be valuable for primordial prevention of type 2 diabetes.
This led Rose (1981) to argue in favor of supplementing individually based interventions, which target those at high risk, with population-based interventions designed to shift the population distribution of a health index in the direction of lower risk.
Public health policies aimed at reducing socioeconomic inequalities in AMI incidence should take note of the considerable benefit of shifting the population distribution, even in seemingly egalitarian countries.
Although changes in BP reported here are not clinically relevant on an individual level, shifting the population distribution of BP has public health significance (Dickinson et al. 2007).
Secondary prevention through anti-hypertensive treatments solely may be hard to justify in the absence of primary intervention to promote lower salt-intake in the population aimed at shifting the population distribution of blood pressure to a lower level.
Birdlife's paper, The Messengers, predicts that most bird species will experience shrinking ranges, disrupted breeding seasons, and many are likely to shift their population distributions too slowly to cope with the onset of climate change.
Shifting population salt consumption to a target distribution of 5 g per person daily could avert approximately 5500 deaths and 23 000 cases of CVD per year in the South African population.
This suggestion was based on the work of Rose [ 86] who contended that a small shift in population distribution can be an effective primary preventative strategy because more events occur among the large number of individuals at moderate risk than the small number at high risk.
These include collective approaches targeting the wider underlying determinants of CVD in an attempt to shift the entire population distribution of CVD risk factors, and approaches that focus on identification of individuals at high risk.
