Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health
August 2015, Volume 69, Issue 8
http://jech.bmj.com/content/current

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Editorial
Life course epidemiology: recognising the importance of adolescence
Russell M Viner, David Ross, Rebecca Hardy, Diana Kuh, Christine Power, Anne Johnson,
Kaye Wellings, Jim McCambridge, Tim J Cole, Yvonne Kelly, G David Batty
J Epidemiol Community Health 2015;69:719-720 Published Online First: 2 February 2015 doi:10.1136/jech-2014-20530
Extract
Life course epidemiology may be conceptualised as “the study of long term effects on later health or disease risk of physical or social exposures during gestation, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and later adult life.”1 Adolescence, the period between childhood and adulthood defined by the WHO as 10–19 years, has an uneasy status in epidemiology. On the one hand, adolescents, who now number over 1.2 billion worldwide—around 20% of the global population—are highly visible in population-based studies. Young people’s behaviours have been an important subject of epidemiological inquiry, from tobacco and alcohol use to violence and sexual activity. Yet, concepts of adolescence as a discrete stage in the life course have been much less discussed within epidemiology. This is particularly so in studies of the developmental origins of adult health and disease, which have focused on the influence on adult health outcomes of exposures from the period of rapid physiological change in very early life. Similarly, investigators in the field of the social determinants of health and disease have concentrated their efforts on the effects of parenting and education in early childhood.