Population Health Across the Life Course: Perinatal Period to Older Age

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering life course epidemiology across the perinatal period, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and older age, derived from public health lectures.

Life Course Perspective

A framework that brings the time dimension to understanding how health is produced, viewing the health of individuals and populations as the result of dynamic interactions between exposures and events across four primary phases: perinatal, infancy, and childhood (ages $0\text{--}14$), adolescence and young adulthood (ages $15\text{--}24$), adulthood (ages $25\text{--}64$), and older adulthood (ages $65$ and older).

Upstream–Downstream Thinking

A conceptual approach in life course health indicating that exposures and experiences encountered upstream early in life not only produce immediate consequences but also set in motion ongoing currents of downstream influences that affect health throughout subsequent years.

Nurturing Care Framework

An evidence-based framework designed to help children survive, thrive, and fulfill developmental potential, organized into five essential domains: good health, adequate nutrition, security and safety, responsive caregiving, and opportunities for early learning.

Epigenesis

A biological mechanism that begins at conception, serving as a built-in developmental process through which human learning and gene-environment interactions unfold.

Health Capital

The aggregate set of personal, social, and physiological resources accumulated by an individual that determines trajectories of health, resilience, and longevity across the life course, expanding or contracting significantly during adolescence.

Infant Mortality Rate (IMR)

A foundational measure of population health defined as the number of infant deaths occurring before the first birthday per $1,000$ live births.

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)

A cluster of early traumatic events and household dysfunctions, encompassing direct personal harm and neglect (physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect) and household member conditions (intimate partner violence, substance misuse, mental illness, parental separation or divorce, incarcerated household member).

ACEs Ecological Pyramid

A conceptual model illustrating how adverse childhood experiences exert cumulative life-course effects starting from conception: ACEs lead to disrupted neurodevelopment, resulting in social, emotional, and cognitive impairment, which prompts the adoption of health risk behaviors, culminating in disease, disability, social problems, and early death.

Gateway Hypothesis

A behavioral progression theory popularized by Denise and Eric Kandel suggesting that early life experimentation with tobacco cigarettes and resulting nicotine addiction frequently serves as a preparatory pathway leading to alcohol use, marijuana experimentation, illicit drug use, and problem behaviors.

Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS)

A CDC public health surveillance system that monitors priority health behaviors among youth, focusing on physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, tobacco/substance use, sexual risk behaviors, and actions that elevate risks for unintentional injuries and violence.

Sandwich Generation

The demographic cohort of working adults (principally ages $25\text{--}64$) who carry the simultaneous financial and caretaking responsibility of supporting three generations: themselves, their growing children, and their aging parents.

Emerging Adulthood

A newly defined transitional developmental phase spanning ages $18\text{--}29$ years, characterized by identity exploration, accepting new adult roles, making independent choices, and establishing self-sufficiency.

Eco-Biodevelopmental Framework

An ecological and biological paradigm viewing adult noncommunicable diseases as developmental conditions that originate from early childhood adversity, toxic stress, and socioeconomic disadvantage.

Life's Simple 7

The American Heart Association's evidence-based blueprint for cardiovascular health consisting of seven modifiable lifestyle goals: manage blood pressure, control cholesterol, reduce blood sugar, get active, eat better, lose weight, and stop smoking.

Healthy People 2030

A United States national health promotion initiative that sets $10\text{-year}$, measurable, evidence-based objectives to reduce disease occurrence, eliminate health disparities, and extend healthy longevity.

Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY)

A universal public health summary measure representing the loss of the equivalent of $1\text{ year}$ of full health, calculated as the sum of years of life lost to premature mortality (YLL) and years lived with disability (YLD).

WISEWOMAN

Well-Integrated Screening and Evaluation for Women Across the Nation; a public health initiative providing low-income, underinsured, or uninsured women ages $40\text{--}64$ years with annual clinical screenings, lifestyle counseling, and community referrals to prevent heart disease and stroke.

Million Hearts 2027

A national public health initiative co-led by the CDC and CMS aimed at preventing $1\text{ million}$ heart attacks and strokes over a $5\text{-year}$ period by advancing cardiovascular clinical protocols (ABCs), health equity, and reductions in tobacco use, physical inactivity, and particulate air pollution.

Demographic Transition Model

A historical demographic model consisting of five stages describing how countries transition from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates through socioeconomic modernization, shifting from natural increase to potential natural population decrease.

Compression of Morbidity

The public health goal of maximally reducing the number of years spent living with serious illness or disability at the end of life, thereby expanding the proportion of the lifespan lived in robust, functional health.

Health-Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE)

The average number of years that a person at a given age can expect to live in full health, adjusted for years lived with limitations resulting from disease and injury.

Multimorbidity

The co-occurrence and clinical diagnosis of two or more chronic noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) within an individual, requiring complex multidisciplinary management and coordinated health services.

Activities of Daily Living (ADLs)

A standardized six-item scale measuring functional self-care independence in older adults, comprising bathing, dressing, toileting, continence, transferring, and feeding/eating.

Frailty

A distinctive, vulnerable biological state in older adults characterized by diminished physiological reserves and reduced resilience against physical and psychological stressors, distinct from, but often preceding, overt disability.

Triple Dividend of Aging

The counterintuitive public health and economic advantage obtained when healthcare systems redirect resources toward primary care and disease prevention in older adults, summarized as 'thriving lives, costing less, contributing more.'

Five WHO Strategies for Older Adults

A set of five core public health priorities established by the World Health Organization to optimize health and function during older age: meet basic needs, learn and make decisions, be mobile, build relationships, and contribute.