American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on March 14, 2008
American Journal of Epidemiology 2008 167(10):1268; doi:10.1093/aje/kwn054
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BOOK REVIEW |
Epidemiological Methods in Life Course Research
Edited by Andrew Pickles, Barbara Maughan, and Michael Wadsworth
State University of Rio de Janeiro, 22471–180 Rio de Janeiro RJ, Brazil
(e-mail: efaerstein{at}gmail.com)
ISBN 978-0-19-8528-487, Oxford University Press, New York, New York (Telephone 800-445-9714, Fax 919-677-1303, Website: http://www.oupusa.org), 2007, 258 pp., $57.50 (Paperback)
Persons interested in the burgeoning field of life-course epidemiology will benefit greatly from reading Epidemiological Methods in Life Course Research, the third volume in the Life Course Approach to Adult Health series from Oxford University Press. While the first two volumes in the series (1, 2) were more conceptual and disease-oriented, this one focuses more explicitly on study design, measurement, and analytical issues that are crucial to the field.
The three British editors—joined by eight collaborators from Britain, Canada, and Norway—address numerous topics in nine chapters. The first chapter, an introduction, covers the development and progression of life-course ideas in epidemiology. Chapter 2 addresses measurement and design for life-course studies of individual differences and development, and chapter 3 addresses measurement and design for life-course studies of the social environment and its impact on health. In chapter 4, design for life-course studies of genetic effects is addressed. Chapter 5 covers human development, the human life course, intervention, and health. Chapter 6 addresses the life-course plot in life-course analysis, and chapter 7 covers methods for handling missing data. Chapter 8 gives an overview of models and methods for life-course analysis, and chapter 9 gives an overview of methods for studying events and their timing.
All of the contributing authors have published important empirical and/or theoretical work on related areas of interest. Throughout the book, the authors appropriately emphasize the strong connections between the current construct of life-course epidemiology and vigorous research traditions in epidemiology, biology, psychology, and the social sciences.
Bibliographic citations are drawn from an impressive range of disciplines. The authors mine not only medical, public health, statistical, and epidemiologic journals but also other sources from the basic and social sciences, not only referencing recent state-of-the-art articles but also pulling up old classics relevant to a field of epidemiology that is still in its infancy. This interdisciplinary quality of the book is especially welcome, because epidemiology has been increasingly enriched by life-course approaches that in turn benefit from sound biologic and social theories.
The field of life-course epidemiology has benefited, in recent years, from new data sources (and novel use of old data, through linkage or catch-up methods), advances in measurement methods (from biologic markers and genetic polymorphisms to measures of well-being and cognition), and new analytic methods. These advances and the scholarly progression of ideas in life-course analysis have generated increasingly refined research questions—how to address the role of critical and sensitive periods, complex patterns of risk accumulation, and causal pathways—all issues that will demand further advances in order to be successfully addressed.
The book clearly looks ahead when it discusses the complexities involved in large population biobanks, the source from which new evidence on gene-environment interplay is likely to arise. Importantly, this volume also provides readers with useful practical advice (in addition to the more theoretical chapters)—for example, advice on how to graphically analyze size-growth dynamics and interactions and on alternatives to deal with missing data and to model complex survival data, all vexing challenges in life-course analyses.
As tends to occur with multiauthor volumes, there is some degree of repetition and discontinuity; however, cross-referencing of chapters by some of the authors and a thoughtful Afterword and conclusions by the editors in the end give the volume cohesion.
In conjunction with the other two volumes in this Oxford series, this book is of interest to both experienced epidemiologists and those in training programs, in addition to life-course researchers in related fields.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Conflict of interest: none declared.
References
- Kuh D, Ben Schlomo Y. A life course approach to chronic disease epidemiology. (2004) 2nd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Kuh D, Hardy R. A life course approach to women's health. (2003) New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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