ACRC Academy PhD student Laurence Rowley-Abel on research that takes the long view When it comes to health in old age, research is increasingly demonstrating the significant impact of experiences we have had much earlier in our lives. Experiences of poverty or trauma in childhood have been shown to have scarring effects on health that last into later life. Similarly, recent analysis has suggested that insecure housing throughout early adulthood and midlife is associated with how our DNA expression changes as we grow old. This means that, if we want to understand the health of older adults, we need to look far earlier than just later life and start looking at people’s ‘lifecourse’ – the whole trajectory from childhood through to end of life. This is the perspective that is taken at the Society for Longitudinal Lifecourse Studies (SLLS) conference, which brings together researchers examining how health, social and economic outcomes are shaped across the lifecourse.As an ACRC PhD researcher, I’ve been fortunate enough to attend the last three annual SLLS conferences. While there, I’ve presented work on how the areas we live in across our lives influence ageing. For example, last year I presented work on the long-term health impacts of living in a coastal community. In the UK, people who are ageing in coastal towns tend to have significantly worse health than those living in inland areas, even when accounting for factors such as age and socio-economic status. For example, when comparing coastal and inland areas with similar age profiles and levels of deprivation, the prevalence of dementia is approximately 5% higher in coastal towns. Yet, we don’t have a full understanding of why this is – what is it about ageing in these communities that is driving these worse outcomes? This is exactly the sort of question that demands a lifecourse perspective. The health of older adults in coastal towns is linked to the long histories of declining industries in these areas (such as fishing and ship building) and the social and economic impact that this had on residents, potentially many decades before they reached later life. As part of this, it is useful to examine when in the lifecourse people in coastal towns develop different health conditions, and so the work I presented at SLLS looked at how the age of onset of certain common conditions varies between coastal and inland settings.At the same time, the SLLS conference is a great opportunity to engage with other researchers who use a lifecourse perspective in their work. For example, at this year’s conference, a colleague from University College London – Gergő Baranyi – presented research that applies a lifecourse perspective to studying how air pollution in childhood might affect health many years later. Research has demonstrated the wide range of impacts that pollutants have on the body, but existing studies are often only based on snapshots of people’s exposure at one particular moment. Therefore, we need research that examines how exposure accumulates across the lifecourse and whether there are ‘sensitive periods’ where pollution can have an especially detrimental impact. Cohort 2 PhD student Laurence Rowley-Abel This is just one example of the type of research presented at the SLLS conferences. As a gathering that is focused on a theme – the lifecourse – rather than a particular discipline, it brings together researchers across numerous fields, from epidemiology to economics. But in each area, the importance of taking the ‘long view’ is clear. While this may seem somewhat self-evident – people’s lives now are affected by their past – it is a perspective that is often missing in research, given the complexities of collecting data over such long time periods and the pressure to publish results from studies as soon as possible. However, the SLLS conferences are a great reminder of how doing such detailed work to trace people’s experiences and exposures across past decades gives us a better picture of how they ended up where they are now. This article was published on Tuesday 6 October 2026
