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Tracy Hampton, PhD

JAMA. 2005;294:29-31.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Prevention, as English clergyman Thomas Adams observed in 1618, "is so much better than healing because it saves the labour of being sick." And while the preventive tools available to Adams and his 17th-century contemporaries were sparse compared with today’s arsenal of vaccines, drugs to lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and other compounds, interest in discovering agents that can lower an individual’s risk of conditions such as cancer and heart disease has never been higher.

But the goal of chemoprevention—to make asymptomatic people better off than they already are—is a very high bar to clear, said Barnett Kramer, MD, PhD, of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Disease Prevention.

Despite this challenge, research continues to reveal clues into the molecular biology of disease, and more opportunities for disease prevention are being recognized, particularly for cancer. As recent data have shown, though, cancer chemoprevention trials are not . . . [Full Text of this Article]

FROM VITAMINS TO ASPIRIN