175217 Leveraging Opportunities for Prevention Across the Lifecourse: The Case for Collaboration between MCH and Chronic Disease

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Neal Halfon, MD, MPH , UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
A lifecourse perspective uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand the long-term effects of chronic disease risk from biological, physiological, behavioral, and psychosocial exposures from gestation to adulthood. The lifecourse framework explains how biological and environmental exposures change individual and societal health outcomes across a lifetime and generations. Risk factors, protective factors, and early-life experiences affect people's long-term health outcomes. Collaboration between maternal and child health (MCH), chronic disease, and other state and local health divisions can not only shift departmental from treatment to early prevention, but can create more streamlined and comprehensive approaches to public health. Investing in MCH programs can in effect reduce the development of chronic disease and maximize resources.

Speaker Neal Halfon, MD, MPH, will overview how health developments over a lifetime can influence future outcomes. Health trajectories develop over a lifetime, creating multiple points for prevention and intervention, policy and research. The speaker will express how the timing and sequence of biological, psychological, cultural, and historical events and experiences can change health development and outcomes of both individuals and populations.

Learning Objectives:
1. Identify how social, physical, and biological influences have a variable impact on trajectories of health development depending on the stage of the lifecourse. 2. Describe how different health trajectories are the product of cumulative risk and protective factors and other influences that are incorporated into regulatory systems during critical and sensitive periods throughout the lifespan. 3. Discuss innovative approaches measure the health of individuals and populations and implications for future research

Keywords: Birth Outcomes, Chronic Diseases

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the Director of the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities, the Child and Family Health Program in the UCLA School of Public Health, and the federally funded Maternal and Child Health Bureau’s National Center for Infancy and Early Childhood Health Policy Research. I am a Professor of Pediatrics in the UCLA School of Medicine and Professor of Community Health Sciences in the UCLA School of Public Health, and is Professor of Policy Studies in the School of Public Policy and Social Research.
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.

See more of: Infant and Child Health Poster Session-2
See more of: Maternal and Child Health