Social pathways between childhood and adult health

Abstract

Abstract There are two main ways that socioeconomic factors throughout the life course affect adult health and disease risk. First, they affect exposures to known or suspected causal factors during gestation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood which are part of long term biological chains of risk. Second, they form part of social chains of risk that begin with a socially compromised start to life, operate throughout the life course partly via educational and other learning experiences, and lead to adult socioeconomic circumstances which affect disease risk through exposures to causal factors in later life. Causal factors at each life stage include physical hazards and behaviours with known or suspected biological pathways, but may also include stressful life conditions which affect biological resources through psychosocial processes which are only beginning to be understood. Thus evidence from two types of studies are reviewed in this chapter: (1) aetiological studies which have examined how variations in adult disease are related to social factors at different stages of the life course in order to understand biological chains of risk, and; (2) studies of social chains of risk, which have investigated either the extent to which individuals experience continuity in their socioeconomic environment or how they interact with their environment in ways that lead to socially patterned exposures which may damage or protect health capital.