Life course research: new opportunities for establishing social and biological plausibility

Excerpt

Life course research on health and disease has reached a new stage in exploring the social-to-biological transition. Large longitudinal datasets containing sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics, self-reported health assessments, psychological and biological data are coming into maturation and being made available to researchers. Some examples are the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the UK Household longitudinal study (Understanding Society), The Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA), and linked registry data sets (particularly in Scandinavia). Consequently, questions around how environmental factors (in the broadest sense including social, psychosocial, behavioural, physical, etc.) lead to biological alterations over time can now be investigated on a wider scale, and in a variety of contexts and disciplines. Such work might also lead to a better understanding of the social structure of such social-to-biological mechanisms across the life course. …