Promoting Healthy Development

Some of the most influential medical research over the past decades illuminates the nature of the developmental origins and progression of the pervasive causes of morbidity and mortality in adults. In actuality, chronic diseases often get seeded and begin their pathological trajectories during gestation or childhood, sometimes decades before clinical manifestations create functional limitations. In other instances, conditions formerly seen only in older adult populations are now affecting people at younger ages. Scientific insights into epigenetics, psychoneuroimmunology, and biological stress reactivity further inform our understanding of causal links among the social determinants of health, emotion, biological risk, and health over the lifespan. (For more information on this topic, see the Promoting Lifelong Health for Families and Communities theme.)