The Emerging Theoretical Framework of Life Course Health Development: An LCRN Webinar with Neal Halfon & Christopher Forrest
January 25, 2018
This webinar, part of the LCRN’s series based on the Handbook of Life Course Health Development, features Neal Halfon, MD, MPH – director of the Life Course Research Network (LCRN) – and Christopher B. Forrest, MD, PhD – pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
In this webinar, Drs. Halfon and Forrest will present the 7 principles that comprise their life course health development framework, including the empirical evidence that underlies each principle and the implications for future research. By shining a light on how early experience conditions future biological responses and influences health development pathways, the presenters hope to encourage theory building and testing, inspire innovative transdisciplinary research, and lead to future discussions that can help to mature the framework into a scientific model with descriptive, explanatory, and predictive utility.
Reproduced from: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-47143-3_2
Table1. Principles of the Life Course Health Development Framework
|
Principle |
Brief description |
|---|---|
|
1. Health Development |
Health development integrates the concepts of health and developmental processes into a unified whole |
|
2. Unfolding |
Health development unfolds continuously over the lifespan, from conception to death, and is shaped by prior experiences and environmental interactions |
|
3. Complexity |
Health development results from adaptive, multilevel, and reciprocal interactions between individuals and their physical, natural, and social environments |
|
4. Timing |
Health development is sensitive to the timing and social structuring of environmental exposures and experiences |
|
5. Plasticity |
Health development phenotypes are systematically malleable and enabled and constrained by evolution to enhance adaptability to diverse environments |
|
6. Thriving |
Optimal health development promotes survival, enhances well-being, and protects against disease |
|
7. Harmony |
Health development results from the balanced interactions of molecular, physiological, behavioral, cultural, and evolutionary processes |
Resources
Halfon N, Hochstein M. Life Course Health Development: An Integrated Framework for Developing Health, Policy, and Research. The Milbank Quarterly. 2002;80(3):433-479. doi:10.1111/1468-0009.00019.
This article describes the Life Course Health Development (LCHD) framework, which was created to explain how health trajectories develop over an individual’s lifetime and how this knowledge can guide new approaches to policy and research. Using recent research from the fields of public health, medicine, human development, and social sciences, the LCHD framework shows that
Based on the relationship between experience and the biology and psychology of development, the LCHD framework offers a conceptual model for health development and a more powerful approach to understanding diseases. Throughout this article, we illustrate how risk factors, protective factors, and early-life experiences affect people’s long-term health and disease outcomes. A better understanding of health development should enable us to manipulate early risk factors and protective factors and help shift our emphasis on treatment in the later stages of disease to the promotion of earlier, more effective preventive strategies and interventions focused on maximizing optimal health development.
Halfon N, Larson K, Lu M, Tullis E, Russ S. Lifecourse Health Development: Past, Present and Future. Maternal and Child Health Journal. 2014;18(2):344-365. doi:10.1007/s10995-013-1346-2.
Abstract
During the latter half of the twentieth century, an explosion of research elucidated a growing number of causes of disease and contributors to health. Biopsychosocial models that accounted for the wide range of factors influencing health began to replace outmoded and overly simplified biomedical models of disease causation. More recently, models of lifecourse health development (LCHD) have synthesized research from biological, behavioral and social science disciplines, defined health development as a dynamic process that begins before conception and continues throughout the lifespan, and paved the way for the creation of novel strategies aimed at optimization of individual and population health trajectories. As rapid advances in epigenetics and biological systems research continue to inform and refine LCHD models, our healthcare delivery system has struggled to keep pace, and the gulf between knowledge and practice has widened. This paper attempts to chart the evolution of the LCHD framework, and illustrate its potential to transform how the MCH system addresses social, psychological, biological, and genetic influences on health, eliminates health disparities, reduces chronic illness, and contains healthcare costs. The LCHD approach can serve to highlight the foundational importance of MCH, moving it from the margins of national debate to the forefront of healthcare reform efforts. The paper concludes with suggestions for innovations that could accelerate the translation of health development principles into MCH practice.
Keywords: Lifecourse health development, LCHD, Epigenetics, Systems biology, Genomics, Biopsychosocial, DOHaD, Complexity
Reproduced from: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-47143-3
Handbook of Life Course Health Development – 2018
Editors:
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
This handbook synthesizes and analyzes the growing knowledge base on life course health development (LCHD) from the prenatal period through emerging adulthood, with implications for clinical practice and public health. It presents LCHD as an innovative field with a sound theoretical framework for understanding wellness and disease from a lifespan perspective, replacing previous medical, biopsychosocial, and early genomic models of health. Interdisciplinary chapters discuss major health concerns (diabetes, obesity), important less-studied conditions (hearing, kidney health), and large-scale issues (nutrition, adversity) from a lifespan viewpoint. In addition, chapters address methodological approaches and challenges by analyzing existing measures, studies, and surveys. The book concludes with the editors’ research agenda that proposes priorities for future LCHD research and its application to health care practice and health policy.
Topics featured in the Handbook include:
- The prenatal period and its effect on child obesity and metabolic outcomes.
- Pregnancy complications and their effect on women’s cardiovascular health.
- A multi-level approach for obesity prevention in children.
- Application of the LCHD framework to autism spectrum disorder.
- Socioeconomic disadvantage and its influence on health development across the lifespan.
- The importance of nutrition to optimal health development across the lifespan.
The Handbook of Life Course Health Development is a must-have resource for researchers, clinicians/professionals, and graduate students in developmental psychology/science; maternal and child health; social work; health economics; educational policy and politics; and medical law as well as many interrelated subdisciplines in psychology, medicine, public health, mental health, education, social welfare, economics, sociology, and law.
Keywords
- ACEs and health development science
- Adverse childhood experiences and health development science
- Autism and health across the life course
- Biological embedding and health outcomes
- Chronic kidney disease across the life course
- Community and heath development
- Developmental origins of chronic illnesses
- Diabetes and life course health
- Family and health development
- Fetal programming and health development
- Health disparities across the lifespan
- Hearing loss and health development
- Life course health development science
- MCH and health development science
- Maternal and child health over the life course
- Nutrition and health across the lifespan
- Obesity and health
- Oral health across the life course
- Self-regulation and health
- Spina Bifada across the life course
Editors and affiliations
Bibliographic information
- DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47143-3
- Copyright InformationThe Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
- License CC BY
- Publisher Name Springer, Cham
- eBook Packages Medicine
- Print ISBN978-3-319-47141-9
- Online ISBN978-3-319-47143-3
- Buy this book on publisher’s site
Emerging Frameworks
Life Stages
The Life Course Origins and Consequences of Select Major Health Conditions and Issues
Crosscutting Topics in Life Course Health Development
Methodological Approaches
Future Directions
