Early Life Social Policies to Delay Lifelong Biological Ageing (LIFELONG)

Ageing is not a simple reflection of the number of years lived: individuals age at different rates. People from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to be exposed to social and environmental factors that accelerate the rate of biological ageing relative to chronological age, resulting in the premature onset of disease, disability and death. A major contributor to accelerated ageing is poverty-associated stress, which begins in the womb and extend throughout life. Ideally, social interventions would be provided early in life, before exposures accumulate. Establishing the impact of early life interventions on healthy ageing over the life course is challenging because longer-term follow-up is rarely available.

LIFELONG will seek to do just that using innovative measures of biological ageing which can capture changes in healthy ageing over timescales of years rather than decades, long before chronic diseases manifest themselves. It will fuse theory and data from multiple disciplines (social policy, economics, genetics, biology) to assess for the first time whether social interventions implemented early in life can slow down biological ageing. Integrating social policy evaluation and new developments in biological ageing will open opportunities to advance inference about the causes of social disparities in healthy ageing and how to remedy them. Specifically, I will determine (1) whether an intensive early life intervention can delay biological ageing in adolescence; (2) whether education policies targeting duration, quality and access to schooling can impact the rate of biological ageing in adulthood; and (3) the effect of delaying biological ageing through early life social interventions on future mortality and morbidity trends.

The answers to these questions will contribute to advancing the next frontier in our understanding of the social determinants of health and ageing: Is slowing the pace of ageing through early life social interventions within reach?