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

老龄化并不是简单地反映生活年数：个人以不同的速度老化。来自弱势背景的人往往受到社会和环境因素的影响，这些因素加速了相对于实足年龄的生物老化速度，导致过早发病、残疾和死亡。加速衰老的一个主要因素是与贫穷有关的压力，这种压力始于子宫，并贯穿一生。理想情况下，社会干预应在生命早期，在暴露累积之前提供。确定生命早期干预措施对整个生命过程中健康老龄化的影响具有挑战性，因为长期随访很少可用。LIFELONG将寻求使用创新的生物老龄化措施来做到这一点，这些措施可以在慢性疾病出现之前很久，在几年而不是几十年的时间尺度上捕捉健康老龄化的变化。它将融合来自多个学科（社会政策、经济学、遗传学、生物学）的理论和数据，首次评估生命早期实施的社会干预是否可以减缓生物衰老。将社会政策评价与生物老龄化方面的新发展结合起来，将为进一步推断健康老龄化方面社会差距的原因以及如何补救提供机会。具体而言，我将确定（1）密集的早期生活干预是否可以延迟青春期的生物衰老;（2）针对教育持续时间，质量和入学机会的教育政策是否可以影响成年后的生物衰老率;以及（3）通过早期生活社会干预延迟生物衰老对未来死亡率和发病率趋势的影响。这些问题的答案将有助于推进我们对健康和老龄化的社会决定因素的理解的下一个前沿：通过生命早期的社会干预来减缓老龄化的步伐是否触手可及？

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?