LIFE COURSE HEALTH DEVELOPMENT

 

A Framework for Understanding How Health Develops

 

The Life Course Health Development (LCHD) framework explains how health trajectories develop over an individual’s lifetime.  The LCHD framework shows that:

• Health is a consequence of multiple determinants operating in nested genetic, biological, behavioral, social, and economic contexts that change as a person develops.

• Health development is an adaptive process composed of multiple transactions between these contexts and the biobehavioral regulatory systems that define human functions.

• Different health trajectories are the product of cumulative risk and protective factors and other influences that are programmed into biobehavioral regulatory systems during critical and sensitive periods.

• The timing and sequence of biological, psychological, cultural, and historical events and experiences influence the health and development of both individuals and populations.

 

From:  “Life Course Health Development: An Integrated Framework for Developing Health, Policy, and Research” Neal Halfon and Miles Hochstein:  The Milbank Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 3, 2002.

Illuminating Racial Disparities in Health

The Perinatal Network uses this framework to describe perinatal health in Monroe County because of its power to shed light on many of the seemingly intractable health issues in the community.  African American and Latino babies are more likely to be born too early and too small than their white peers; they grow up to have more health and behavioral challenges; and as adults they experience more (and more severe) chronic diseases.  These disparities persist across generations, even when socioeconomic status changes.  Clearly, improving perinatal outcomes requires understanding the dynamics of these disparate health trajectories.

Rochester Health Equity

  Between September, 2008 and January 2009, nearly 100 people from all over our community came together for a series of discussions about how race, and more importantly racism, contributes to inequities in diabetes, hypertension/cardiovascular disease, inflammatory disease and infection, and low birth weight.  We learned from experts and from one another about the reality of health disparities.  But we also learned from one another about the ways that the community can create health equity -- how we can diminish the factors that suppress the life course trajectory and enhance the factors that support a positive life course trajectory.

To learn more about Life Course Health Development and the Rochester Health Equity Community Action Plan, follow these links: