From genomes to societies: a holistic view of determinants of human health

• ‘Systems health’ is an emerging interdisciplinary field.
• Systems health integrates biological, behavioral, social factors and their interactions.
• Special emphases are given to health outcomes and modifiable social and behavioral factors.
• Intervention and preventative procedures can be regarded as feedbacks.

Both biological and social sciences have identified contributing factors to human health. However, health outcomes are unlikely to equal a simple sum of these identified factors. This article makes an attempt to put together the information, methods, and technologies that relate to health outcomes from biological, behavioral, and social disciplines. Much of this information was obtained by controlling for the variations of the factors in ‘other’ disciplines. For example, genetic factors were controlled for in identifying the behavioral determinants of health. Looking forward, better understandings of health outcomes may require exploiting the interactions of health determinants that were identified from different disciplines. We propose the concept of ‘systems health’ studies, which take health outcomes as the outputs of a system, where the inputs and their interactions from multiple disciplines are considered.

Figure optionsDownload high-quality image (186 K)Download as PowerPoint slide