| Seq #54 | Thursday, 10 March 2005 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 10:45 AM-12:45 PM Baltimore Convention Center 309, Symposium - Group/Division Sponsored | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Life Course Approach to Chronic Oral Disease | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sponsored by: Behavioral Sciences, Education Research, Geriatric Oral Research | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Description: Recently, aetiological models that predominantly emphasize current adult life styles, such as smoking and diet, have been challenged successfully by growing evidence that impaired early growth and development, childhood infection, educational achievement, nutrition and social and psychosocial disadvantage across the life course affect chronic disease risk, including chronic oral disease. This relatively new area of research is called life course epidemiology. This life course framework for investigating the aetiology and natural history of chronic disease proposes that advantages and disadvantages are accumulated throughout life generating differentials in health later in life. Furthermore, this dynamic framework brings together the effects of intrinsic factors (individual resources) with extrinsic factors (environmental factors). The aim of this symposium is to give an overview of this new epidemiological approach and to discuss how the life course framework has been applied successfully to chronic oral diseases. Specifically, the symposium will include: i) A theoretical presentation, explaining what life course epidemiology is, and how this approach differs from conventional risk factor epidemiology. This presentation will also describe how to build and test theoretical life course models, plus other methodological challenges in this field; ii) Empirical work from cohort studies will be used to illustrate how life course theoretical models have been applied to oral chronic diseases, such as periodontal disease and dental caries; and iii) Alternative methods for collecting reliable retrospective information using cross-sectional designs will be discussed using, as an example, data from a multi-centre study that is employing a life course epidemiological approach to investigate the aetiology and natural history of squamous cell carcinoma of the upper aerodigestive tract. This symposium will be of interest to epidemiologists, public health researchers, health policy makers, educational researchers and all others researching different aspects of the aetiology of periodontal disease, dental caries and oral cancer | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chairperson: P.J. ALLISON | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Back to the IADR/AADR/CADR 83rd General Session (March 9-12, 2005)