Global Perspectives on Implementing Life-course Strategies to Address Health Disparities

Across populations, early-life conditions—from prenatal exposures and perinatal stressors to caregiving quality, neighborhood resources, and schooling—shape biological and social trajectories that manifest in disparities in mental, cardiometabolic, and cognitive health across the lifespan. While a vast literature documents the harms of adversity (poverty, maltreatment, discrimination, environmental hazards), growing evidence highlights protective and promotive experiences—stable nurturing relationships, material security, high-quality early education, safe housing, and supportive policy environments—that buffer toxic stress, scaffold self-regulation and learning, and foster resilience. Integrating life-course epidemiology and DOHaD perspectives with advances in causal inference, geospatial linkage, and biomarker science, this Research Topic invites work that moves beyond risk cataloging to illuminate mechanisms, heterogeneity, and modifiable levers. By centering both adverse and positive exposures, we seek to identify points of intervention that can bend population health trajectories toward longevity and equity.
The problem is clear: despite decades linking early adversity to adult disease, we still lack integrated evidence on how protective early-life experiences offset risk, and for whom, and at which developmental windows interventions yield the largest, durable gains. Analytical challenges, fragmented measures, residual confounding, and limited attention to context hamper translation into policy and practice. This Research Topic aims to close those gaps by: (1) estimating potentially causal effects of adverse and protective exposures across prenatal through adolescent periods on health in midlife and older adulthood; (2) elucidating mechanisms—from stress physiology and epigenetics to schooling, work, and neighborhood pathways; (3) characterizing heterogeneity by sex, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic position, disability, and place; (4) evaluating interventions and policies (e.g., cash/near-cash supports, childcare and preschool access, housing stability); and (5) improving measurement and cross-cohort and cross-national comparability. We invite studies leveraging: harmonized adversity/protective childhood experience metrics; long-running cohorts linked to administrative and geospatial data; natural experiments and target trial emulation; difference-in-differences and synthetic controls; sibling/twin and registry designs; and multimodal biomarkers (e.g., allostatic load, epigenetic clocks). We aim to identify actionable levers that bend population health trajectories toward resilience, longevity, and equity.

This Research Topic will gather global perspectives on how life-course strategies can be implemented to address health disparities, with an emphasis on translating evidence into policy and practice. We invite submissions that explore:
• Pathways linking early-life adversity and protective experiences to long-term health outcomes.
• Evaluations of interventions and policies (e.g., cash transfers, preschool programs, housing stability, community supports).
• Comparative studies across cohorts, global regions, and health and social policy contexts.
• Advances in measurement, harmonization, biomarkers, and equity-focused analyses.
• Mechanisms of resilience, including protective childhood experiences and promotive environments.

We welcome a range of manuscript types, including original research, systematic reviews, scoping reviews, natural experiment evaluations, methodological papers, and policy briefs. Contributions should clearly articulate implications for practice, equity, and life-course strategies to inform global health policy.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Clinical Trial
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Clinical Trial
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review

Keywords: Early-life adversity; Positive childhood experiences; Life-course epidemiology; Protective factors; Resilience; Biological embedding; Critical/sensitive periods; Allostatic load; Epigenetics; Social determinants of health; Causal inference; Policy evaluat

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.