Life course epidemiology aims to study the effect of exposures on health outcomes across the life course from a social, behavioural, and biological perspective. In this Review, we describe how life course epidemiology changes the way the causes of chronic diseases are understood, with the example of hypertension, breast cancer, and dementia, and how it guides prevention strategies. Life course epidemiology uses complex methods for the analysis of longitudinal, ideally population-based, observational data and takes advantage of new approaches for causal inference. It informs primordial prevention, the prevention of exposure to risk factors, from an eco-social and life course perspective in which health and disease are conceived as the results of complex interactions between biological endowment, health behaviours, social networks, family influences, and socioeconomic conditions across the life course. More broadly, life course epidemiology guides population-based and high-risk prevention strategies for chronic diseases from the prenatal period to old age, contributing to evidence-based and data-informed public health actions. In this Review, we assess the contribution of life course epidemiology to public health and reflect on current and future challenges for this field and its integration into policy making.

中文翻译：

---

生命历程流行病学和公共卫生

生命全程流行病学旨在从社会、行为和生物学角度研究暴露对整个生命过程中健康结果的影响。在这篇综述中，我们以高血压、乳腺癌和痴呆症为例，描述了生命历程流行病学如何改变人们对慢性病病因的理解方式，以及它如何指导预防策略。生命历程流行病学使用复杂的方法来分析纵向的、理想情况下基于人群的观察数据，并利用新的因果推断方法。它从生态社会和生命历程的角度，为原始预防、预防暴露于危险因素提供信息，其中健康和疾病被视为生物禀赋、健康行为、社交网络、家庭影响和社会经济之间复杂相互作用的结果。整个生命过程中的条件。更广泛地说，生命全程流行病学指导从产前到老年的慢性疾病的基于人群的高风险预防策略，有助于基于证据和数据的公共卫生行动。在这篇综述中，我们评估了生命历程流行病学对公共卫生的贡献，并反思了该领域当前和未来的挑战及其与政策制定的整合。