Life Course Approaches in Global Health

Abstract

The life course perspective calls for analyses examining individual health trajectories in their historical, social, and cultural contexts. Initiated as a new approach to human development in the 1960s, it has been applied to the study of health for the last three decades in epidemiology. It expands the social determinants of health framework by stressing the importance of considering health over time, at both individual and collective levels. The potential of the life course approach in global health has been made explicit in national and international policy guidance. However, its application in research still remains limited, as a result of a range of challenges including multidisciplinarity, limited access to data and