Life-Course Epidemiology

Life-course epidemiology is the study of how physical and social exposures across gestation, childhood, adolescence, and adult life shape later health and disease risk. Codified by Yoav Ben-Shlomo and Diana Kuh in their 2002 International Journal of Epidemiology paper and the 2003 glossary by Kuh, Ben-Shlomo, Lynch, Hallqvist, and Power, the framework supplies a set of competing conceptual models that specify how the timing and sequence of exposures matter. Rather than asking only what causes disease, it asks when exposures act and how their effects compound. Its three signature models — critical or sensitive periods, accumulation of risk, and chains of risk — give researchers a disciplined way to translate developmental and social theory into testable longitudinal hypotheses about the origins of adult chronic disease.