BE ACTIVE Paper Wins James T. Willerson Award in Clinical Science
Congratulations to Penn’s BE ACTIVE research team, which won the 2024 James T. Willerson Award in Clinical Science from Circulation for their paper on the “Effect of Gamification, Financial Incentives, or Both to Increase Physical Activity Among Patients at High Risk of Cardiovascular Events: The BE ACTIVE Randomized Controlled Trial.”
The award recognizes the best clinical paper published in Circulation in the last 12 months.
“BE ACTIVE shows that strategies informed by behavioral economics can meaningfully, scalably, and inexpensively increase physical activity in people at high risk for heart attacks and strokes,” said Dr. Alexander Fanaroff, the lead study author. “More work is needed, but these interventions could have a big effect on population health.”
See CHIBE’s blog post on the results, key takeaways, and media coverage of the study, which found that people who were given incentives and feedback added around 1,500 steps to their daily step counts, as well as around 40 minutes of bonus moderate exercise to their routines each week.
“My thanks to Alex Fanaroff who did a brilliant job leading this study, to Mitesh Patel for helping to get this study started, to the amazing study team for making it all happen, and to our patient participants for being willing to participate and contribute to the generation of new knowledge on how to reduce cardiovascular risk,” said Dr. Kevin Volpp, senior author of the study and director of CHIBE.
“BE ACTIVE only happened because of the efforts of every member of our tireless, talented, and dedicated study team. It was truly a team effort,” Dr. Fanaroff added.
The award is in celebration of Dr. Willerson who was a major leader within the American Heart Association and served for over a decade as Editor-in-Chief of Circulation.
The team’s efforts will be recognized at the 2024 American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in Chicago this November.
The authors of the paper are: Alexander Fanaroff, Mitesh Patel, Neel Chokshi, Samantha Coratti, David Farraday, Laurie Norton, Charles Rareshide, Jingsan Zhu, Tamar Klaiman, Julia Szymczak, Louise Russell, Dylan Small, and Kevin Volpp.