Life Course Explanation Flashcards
What is the life course explanation for health inequality emergence?
Inequalities in health provide evidence that the biological and the social beginnings of life carry important aspects of the child’s potential for adult health.
(Wadsworth, 1997)
Examples of life courses impacts
Latency: exposure in early life: e.g being exposed to asbestos or passive smoking and then the later effect being cancer.
Cumulative: the cumulative effect of having negative aspects of a person life lead to other things… poverty = poor housing, poor diet, smoking.
Pathway: Early advantage or disadvantage setting a person on a pathway to a certain outcome of health… early events like parental divorce can affect health for years to come.
More complex than just a mother to child transmission as seen in programming explanation
What does a life course approach do?
Readings notes: World Health Organisation (2000)
It looks back across an individual’s life experiences for clues to current patterns of health.
It also recognizes that both past and present experiences are shaped by the wider social, economic and cultural context.
What does a life course approach aim to identify?
Readings notes: (Kuh and Ben-Shlomo, 1997).
It aims to identify the underlying biological, behavioral and psychosocial processes that operate across the life span.
What does birth cohort mean?
Readings notes: World Health Organisation (2000)
A group of people born during a particular period or year.
An environmental change (such as an improvement or deterioration of living standards) that affects the health of children may show up several decades later as birth cohort differences in adult mortality.
Examples of risk factors clustering.
Readings notes: World Health Organisation (2000)
For example, those living in adverse childhood social circumstances are more likely to be of low birth weight, and be exposed to poor diet, childhood infections and passive smoking.
These exposures may raise the risk of adult respiratory disease, perhaps through chains of risk or pathways over time where one adverse (or protective) experience will tend to lead to another adverse
Specific aspects of life course study in epidemiology
Readings notes: World Health Organisation (2000)
Used to study the physical and social hazards from gestation to midlife that affect chronic disease risk and health outcomes in later life.
(Wadsworth, 1997)
Inequalities in health provide evidence that the biological and the social beginnings of life carry important aspects of the child’s potential for adult health.
(Kuh and Ben-Shlomo, 1997).
It aims to identify the underlying biological, behavioral and psychosocial processes that operate across the life span.
It aims to identify the underlying biological, behavioral and psychosocial processes that operate across the life span.
(Kuh and Ben-Shlomo, 1997).
