Environmental threats to healthy aging: A lifespan approach

How and where we live, eat, work, play, and socialize profoundly influence our physical and mental health. Beginning in the womb and continuing throughout life, environmental factors are strong determinants of health decades later. Reproductive, children's, midlife and elder health are inherently interconnected. Both positive and negative features of our biological, physical, social, and natural environments, alone and in combination, can affect health at any time along the life continuum, through multiple mechanisms. Changes in our food, built, chemical, natural, psychosocial, and economic environments have fueled dramatic increases in diseases and disabilities, including diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, some kinds of cancer, and various reproductive and developmental disorders. With the expected near doubling of the over-65 population in the new few decades, this trajectory threatens to overwhelm our health care system and social and economic resources. This session will explore the relationships of these environments to existing and emerging disease patterns, as well as interventions to address them, ranging from the personal to community and societal levels. Interventions that address the structural, systemic origins of many of these diseases can be designed to benefit ecosystems more generally, thereby linking human health to planetary health.