Parents’ preferences for interventions to improve aspects of children’s current and future health: two discrete choice experiments

OBJECTIVE: Large new children's cohorts now allow embedded trials for prevention and early intervention, offering rare opportunities to reduce the burden of childhood and future chronic disease. We explored parents' preferences for interventions targeting children's current and future health, to guide measurement and intervention choices in such cohorts. DESIGN: Two discrete choice experiments (DCEs) were conducted between February and July 2024. Parents made pairwise choices between hypothetical childhood interventions aimed at preventing or mitigating eight high-burden chronic conditions (DCE1: eight diseases of ageing; DCE2: the four most important from DCE1 plus four common childhood conditions). We analysed mean (range 1-8, 1 being highest) and median rankings, using inverse probability weighting to estimate to all Generation Victoria (GenV) parents (n>70 000). PARTICIPANTS: Convenience samples of parents of children aged 6-24 months in GenV, Australia's largest population-representative interventional cohort. RESULTS: 1866 parents completed DCE1 and 1343 completed DCE2, with response rates of 11.4% and 9.8%, respectively. In DCE1, 'cardiovascular health' ranked highest (mean=3.2), followed by 'cognition', 'lung health', 'blood sugar levels', 'bone and muscle strength', 'vision and eye health', 'kidney health' and 'hearing' (mean=5.8). In DCE2, 'anxiety and/or depression' ranked highest (mean=3.6), followed by 'cardiovascular health', 'autism' and 'asthma'. Rankings changed only marginally on weighting. CONCLUSIONS: Parents' priorities are wide-ranging. While low response rates limit translation to policy, rankings weighted to adjust for missing data emerge with compelling themes for future work to triangulate with other consultation methods.