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Rose’s population strat-egy of prevention need not increase social inequalities in health.Int J Epidemiol 2010;39:372–77.26. Victora CG, Matijasevich A, Santos IS, Barros AJD, Horta BL,Barros FC. Breastfeeding and feeding patterns in three birth co-horts in Southern Brazil: trends and differentials. Cad SaudePublica 2008;24:s409–s16.27. Deary IJ, Batty D, Gottfredson LS. Human hierarchies, health,and IQ. Science 2005;309:703; author reply 703.28. Patel R, Oken E, Bogdanovich N, Matush L, Sevkovskaya Z,Chalmers B et al. Cohort Profile: The Promotion ofBreastfeeding Intervention Trial (PROBIT). Int J Epidemiol2013, 8 May. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 23471837.International Journal of Epidemiology, 2014, 1292–1293doi: 10.1093/ije/dyu111Advance Access Publication Date: 20 May 2014Commentary: What is apopulation-basedintervention? Returning to Geoffrey RoseKatherine L FrohlichSchool of Public Health/IRSPUM, Universite´ de Montre´al, C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-Ville, Montre´al,QC, Canada. E-mail: Katherine.frohlich@umontreal.caAccepted 12 February 2014Geoffrey Rose made some remarkable contributions to the field ofpublic health. In his definitive book The Strategy of PreventiveMedicine 1 Rose developed the idea that public health interventions,rather than focusing on change in individual risk profiles for aparticular health problem, should focus instead on altering theconditions that lead to the distribution of risk in a given popula-tion: an idea now known as the population approach. The popula-tion approach is based on a number of premises, one of which isparticularly important for this commentary, namely that the distri-bution of risk exposure in a population is shaped by contextual con-ditions. Therefore population-health interventions should attemptto change the contextual conditions of risk in order to alter the dis-tribution of health risk in populations.In their paper, Yang et al. 2 argue whether population-basedinterventions widen or narrow socioeconomic inequalities, usingthe case study of a large cluster-randomized controlled trial on1292 International Journal of Epidemiology, 2014, Vol. 43, No. 41292 VC The Author 2014; all rights reserved. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association
