Life course epidemiology and analysis

Life course epidemiology approaches disease aetiology and prevention from the perspective of risk and protective factors that influence health and disease throughout the lifespan. The integration of a life course approach to epidemiologic research is central for identifying effective policies and programmes to promote population health and health equity. This chapter will introduce life course concepts and models and analytical approaches for research on life course determinants of health. It will discuss threats to causal inference, approaches for overcoming these difficulties, and future directions in life course epidemiology. For example, in addition to expanding epidemiologic research with a life course perspective to include people with diverse life experiences, new areas of development include life course research extending beyond one human lifespan to include intergenerational and transgenerational life course research, as well as the application of innovative methods.

Feeling Time, Fashioning Age: Pre-teen Girls Negotiating Life Course and the Ageing Process Through Dress

Based on research with eight to eleven-year-old girls from the South of England, I discuss the relationship between their clothes, identity, temporality, life course and the ageing process. Despite media accounts suggesting the passivity of pre-teen girls’ fashionable dress consumption, unknowingly becoming prematurely sexualised through hyper-feminine dress, by using the interlinking of materiality and life course as a lens to explore girls’ understanding of fashion, my research showed that girls engage with popular debates about age-appropriate dress. I demonstrate that the participants were aware of sexual generationing and explored older, hyper-feminine, sexualised identities at specific, socially-approved times. Most significantly, this materiality/life course approach offers new insights into how girls explore the past, present and the future, feeling the passing of time and the ageing process on their bodies, through the materiality of their clothes. It is through dress that girls come to understand age, temporality and where they are on their life course.

Musculoskeletal Changes Across the Lifespan: Nutrition and the Life-Course Approach to Prevention

Aging is characterized by the progressive decline of muscle mass and function, the so-called sarcopenia. Also bone loss is widespread among older people. Sarcopenia and osteopenia/osteoporosis are associated with several adverse outcomes including falls, risk of fractures, functional decline, frailty, and mortality. Recently, the life-course approach to prevent or delay functional decline has become very popular. Regarding musculoskeletal health, there is suggestive evidence that acting during critical or sensitive periods of life in which each person build-up its biological reserves may influence the rate of functional decline in the later stages of life. A life-course approach to musculoskeletal health should take place during early life when plasticity allows more easily the attainment of the peak of the musculoskeletal system driven by environmental stimuli. The rate of the subsequent decline will depend on the peak previously reached. Nutrition and physical exercise are important environmental factors that can influence musculoskeletal development by favoring and maintaining peak bone and muscle mass and strength. Here we provide an overview of body composition changes occurring across the lifespan and strategies based on nutrition and physical exercise to support musculoskeletal health as well as minimizing losses during older life.