China 
Africa 
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Lifecourse Perspectives
Published in Miranda Thurston, Key Themes in Public Health, 2014
Over several decades, a number of countries (the UK, New Zealand, the USA and the Nordic countries in particular) have invested in long-term follow-up studies of children. Together, these have considerably advanced understanding of risk and protective factors across the lifespan. Developments in computing and statistics in recent decades have also given rise to improved capacity and capability to analyse large and complex datasets in terms of continuities and change, by linking data from one part of the lifecourse to another. The British Birth Cohort Studies (carried out in 1946, 1958, 1970, 2000) alongside the UK Life Study (2012) have been especially influential, based as they are on large representative samples of the population with long-term followup. The 1958 Birth Cohort Study, for example, included approximately 17,500 infants born in one week and followed-up at ages 7, 11, 16, 23, 33, 42 and 46 years of age. Data on family background, health, cognitive and behavioural development, educational achievement, employment and family formation have been collected. The repetition of birth cohort studies also allows comparison between different cohorts (for example, 1958 with 1970), allowing the effects of age, period and cohort to be disentangled (Chandola and Marmot, 2004). Repeated cross-sectional surveys (on different cohorts of people rather than the same people) cannot provide the same insights. Researchers can apply for free access to the birth cohort data through the UK data archive.
Life course biological trajectories: maximising the value of longitudinal studies
Published in Annals of Human Biology, 2020
A recognition of the importance of harmonisation has informed our efforts at the Cohort and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resources (CLOSER) consortium to maximise the use, value and impact of longitudinal studies (O’Neill et al. 2019). CLOSER’s work packages have produced retrospectively harmonised datasets and cross-study resource guides that can help researchers leverage existing longitudinal data to answer new questions about changes in health and its determinants over the life course. For example, one CLOSER harmonisation project studied the rise of the obesity epidemic in the UK by age and birth cohort. Johnson et al. (2015) harmonised repeat measures of body size from five British birth cohort studies born in 1946, 1958, 1970, 1990–1992 and 2001, and then showed that the probability of being overweight/obese by age 11 in the two younger cohorts was at least double that of the older cohorts. Additionally, across the three older cohorts, a downward trend in age at which the median adult became overweight illustrated how more recent cohorts are accumulating longer periods of life overweight or obese. The harmonised dataset has been reused in analyses presented in this issue illustrating how the Benn parameter has changed across the cohorts (Johnson et al. 2020). The dataset has also been linked with harmonised data on occupational social class to illustrate how social inequalities in body mass index (BMI) have emerged in parallel with the obesity epidemic and have since persisted (Bann et al. 2018).