How do 'effects' differ across time? Understanding health inequalities by triangulating across multiple data sources and empirical strategies

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Socioeconomic circumstances such as our education or income are thought to have important effects on our health. On average, the more socioeconomically advantaged someone is, the better their health. Contrary to widely-held myth, these differences are not inevitable or unchangeable. Economic and health policies change across time, and are ultimately expected to either worsen (widen) or improve (narrow) these differences. Scientists, government departments, and voluntary organisations all agree that inequalities in health should be reduced. In order to do so, we need to have an evidence-based understanding of how these inequalities have changed across time to help us develop effective policies. This project seeks to generate this evidence. First, it will bring together multiple datasets to investigate how these health inequalities have changed across time in the UK. In the past, researchers have tended to use these studies separately - analysing them together is a very powerful way of understanding how inequalities have changed across time. It will then seek to understand whether these correlations reflect causal relationships. While it is possible that social circumstances are correlated with health, there are other explanations for such correlations. It is also possible that such causal effects differ across time, as society changes; and across age, as people get older. It will do this by using multiple data sources which follow many thousands of individuals across time. It will use information on the environment along with genetic information to attempt to address this. In addition, this project will investigate how the causal role of two other factors may have changed across time. The first is cognitive capability - this refers to how individuals think and process information. On average, those with higher cognitive capability seem to have better health across a range of health measures such as lower cardiovascular disease risk and lower body weight. Due to the increasingly complex nature of society (and potential future changes related to technological development), it is important to understand if the importance of this factor for health has changed across time. The second factor is genetic propensity to ill health. In recent decades our understanding of genetics has greatly improved. We all contain genetic propensity to common health measures, such as body weight and blood pressure, but some individuals have higher genetic propensity than others. These differences do not mean that they will definitively have worse health measures - genetic risk is considered 'probabilistic' rather than 'deterministic'. The expression of these genes also depends on the environment. As such, this project will seek to understand if the links between genetic factors and body weight, blood pressure and mental health have changed across time. Taken together, this project seeks to advance scientific understanding and provide evidence which can ultimately be used to inform national policies related to public health inequalities in the UK.