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Life Course Epidemiology

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Handbook of Epidemiology

Abstract

Life course epidemiology is the study of long-term biological, behavioral, and psychosocial processes that link adult health and disease risk to physical or social exposures acting during gestation, childhood, adolescence, and earlier or adult life or across generations (Kuh and Ben-Shlomo 2004). Life course epidemiology was one of several new conceptual models of epidemiological thinking that began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s and that are now mainstream paradigms in social epidemiology (Susser 1985; Susser and Susser 1996a; Krieger and Zierler 1997; McMichael 1999), though its concepts have been applied more generally to chronic disease etiology. They parallel the emergence of causal models (Greenland et al. 1999; Hernán et al. 2002) for epidemiology during the same period.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The group included Mel Bartley, Yoav Ben-Shlomo, David Blane, Derek Cook, George Davey Smith, Jonathan Elford, Diana Kuh, Dave Leon, Ivan Perry, Chris Power, David Strachan, and Peter Whincup

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    Authors
    1. Yoav Ben-Shlomo
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    2. Gita Mishra
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    3. Diana Kuh
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    1. Department of Epidemiological Methods and Etiologic Research, Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS, Bremen, Germany

      Wolfgang Ahrens

    2. Department of Biometry and Data Management, Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS, Bremen, Germany

      Iris Pigeot

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    Ben-Shlomo, Y., Mishra, G., Kuh, D. (2014). Life Course Epidemiology. In: Ahrens, W., Pigeot, I. (eds) Handbook of Epidemiology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09834-0_56

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