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IJE Advance Access published online on May 17, 2007
International Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/ije/dym099
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2007; all rights reserved.

Commentary: Selected samples and nebulous measures: some methodological difficulties in life-course epidemiology

M Maria Glymour

Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, 722 W. 168th St room 1603, New York, New York 10032
E-mail: mg2630@columbia.edu
Maria Glymour is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University.

Accepted 17 April 2007

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.


   Introduction
 
Ramsay et al.'s article1 contributes to a growing body of research on early life characteristics that predict health in adulthood.2–4 This research demonstrates that adults who lived in deprived socio-economic circumstances as children are more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease than adults who had privileged childhoods; an association that holds even among people with comparable indicators of adult socio-economic position (SEP). These articles provide a welcome impetus to consider how adult health is shaped by early life experiences, but they face a number of methodological problems that compromise causal inference regarding the effects of childhood social conditions on adult health. In this commentary, I wish to focus on just two of these problems: loss to follow-up and inadequate measurement.

Throughout, I assume that the primary causal question of interest is how adult health would differ if we intervened to change childhood SEP, and a . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Methodology
 
What counts as loss to follow-up in a life-course study?
What are we measuring and how well are we measuring it?

   Conclusion
 

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