Adolescent Health and Wellbeing Current Strategies and Future Trends

This book presents a detailed and updated review of the widespread changes that take place during adolescence, adopting a preventive perspective that reflects physical, social, cognitive, and emotional changes. It addresses a broad range of aspects, including: the preventive programs and their systemic effects; the role of environment in influencing the healthy behaviors of adolescents and young adults; the use of e-Health technology in health and behavioral interventions for adolescents; and the clinical and prognostic implications of primordial prevention in healthy adolescents. All of these elements are subsequently reviewed using a multidimensional approach, in order to offer extensive information on the complex changes that characterize adolescents’ physiological, psychological, and neurobiological development.

In addition, the book depicts the preventive strategies currently used in various social settings (school, family, sport club, health policies) aimed not only at reducing lifestyle risk behaviors, but also at improving resilience, happiness, social involvement, self-esteem, and sociability. This update is essential in the light of the fact that, to date, prevention has mainly been directed towards adolescents with physical or mental disorders rather than their healthy peers. As such, the book offers a valuable tool for pediatricians, child and adolescents psychiatrists, and for all professionals involved in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.

Alessandro Pingitore works as a scientist at the Institute of Clinical Physiology (National Research Council), Pisa, Italy. His main research fields are the assessment of cardiac function and morphology by means of non-invasive cardiac imaging, the relationship between thyroid hormone and the heart, and the physiological response to strenuous physical stress in normal and extreme environments. He is responsible for the AVATAR project, an Italian multicenter study for the promotion and evaluation of health and wellbeing among healthy adolescents.  He is the author of 138 articles published in international peer-reviewed journals, 2 books, and 10 book chapters.

Francesca Mastorci graduated with a degree in Biology and Biomedical Science, subsequently receiving her PhD in Systemic Physiopathology for a study of the physiological and psychological effects of exposure to stressors in experimental animal models and humans. Her chief research interest is in psychophysiological stress response and its countermeasures using standardized protocols, including the analysis of high density EEG in humans, autonomic, endocrine and metabolic measurements, and the study of nonverbal behaviors in different stages of life, with a particular focus on adolescence through the AVATAR project. She is the author of 25 articles published in international peer-reviewed journals.