TAILORING INTERVENTIONS FOR HEALTH BEHAVIOR-CHANGE IN BREAST-CANCER SCREENING

PURPOSE: Health professionals continue to seek strategies to help indi viduals increase health-promoting behaviors and decrease those behavio rs related to unhealthy lifestyles. Various health behavior theories c urrently guide interventions that focus on health behavior changes. Of these, a tailored approach uses individual data on beliefs and behavi or to guide the content and delivery of interventions, Tile purpose of this paper is to explain the usefulness of theories in tailoring heal th promotion messages to increase health-protecting behaviors. OVERVIE W: A brief overview of current popular theories that focus on individu al behavior is presented, followed by illustrations of a tailored inte rvention approach for breast cancer screening. Applications of the tai lored intervention approach in ongoing studies to increase breast canc er screening are described. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Clinical implicatio ns of the ongoing projects suggest practical and widespread utility of tailoring health-promoting messages to increase healthy lifestyles. T he tailored approach may be used by a multidisciplinary team to focus on the individual's unique factors to impact behavior change rather th an to deliver tile same standard message to all individuals.