294050
Health disparities in a cohort followed before birth to age 50
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
: 12:50 p.m. - 1:10 p.m.
Bruce Link, PhD,
Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University, New York, NY
A strong precept of life course epidemiology tells us that adult health is the product of cumulative, sequenced relations between persons and environments. As powerful as this insight is the opportunity to enact its potential has been limited by the availability of data that allows its realization. We describe a study that provides an opportunity to examine a potential dynamic interplay between social conditions, cognitive abilities, and emerging health across the life course to explain health disparities by race and SES in adult life. The explanatory focus embedded in each of these factors such that the first emphasizes social factors, the second emphasizes cognitive factors, and the third emerging health itself. Our study brings these strands of inquiry together in one study to allow an examination of their dynamic interplay across the life course. We employ data from the Child Health and Development Studies (CHDS) as this cohort provides excellent information from early life through adolescence on SES, on cognitive ability, and on the health domains we have chosen to study. In the current research, these novel data are brought to fruition to study the emergence of self-reported health disparities by race and SES in a sample of 603 CHDS cohort members at midlife.
Learning Areas:
Diversity and culture
Epidemiology
Social and behavioral sciences
Learning Objectives:
Assess whether childhood socioeconomic resources mitigate the effect of early health adversity on later health adversity.
Keyword(s): Health Disparities, Children's Health
Presenting author's disclosure statement:Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am an expert in the social determinants of health. Further I have data from a long term follow of people who were ascertained in utero, followed through adolescence and have now been re-interviewed at age 50.
Any relevant financial relationships? No
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines,
and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed
in my presentation.
