CHDR Seminar Series Presents Dr. Jason Fletcher: “Moving Forward by Looking Back: New Evidence that Early Life Shapes Our Lifespan”
December 3 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm CST
Join us on December 3, 2024 from 12–1 p.m. for a talk by Jason Fletcher, PhD.
Lunch will be provided for in-person attendees.
Unable to attend in person? Please join us via Zoom.
Details included with registration.
About the Speaker
Jason Fletcher, PhD is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Public Affairs with appointments in Applied Economics and Population Health Sciences.
A specialist in health economics, economics of education, social genomics, and child and adolescent health policy, Professor Fletcher focuses his research on examining social network effects on adolescent education and health outcomes, combining genetics and social science research, estimating long-term consequences of childhood mental illness, and examining how in utero and early life conditions affect later life health, cognition, and mortality. He is an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty, Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies, Center for Demography and Ecology, and the Data Science Institute at the university and a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Group at the University of Chicago.
About the Talk
The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease hypothesis proposes an important link between social/environmental conditions experienced early in life and old age health. Early conditions “program” our body’s response to challenges—famine conditions experienced in utero signal the developing organs and brain to store scarce energy; this programming leads to obesity and diabetes when the individual faces an environment with unlimited calories. However, discovering these important links with current data faces the challenge of needing data spanning ~80+ years to capture early life and old age; and we need ‘big data’ to find complex effects. We have no such data available. Our team makes use of newly released big data from the US Historical Census that captures early life linked to recent mortality records in order to overcome these challenges. Our results suggest widespread effects of early exposures on old age longevity—ranging from pesticide exposure to racial violence in the early 1900s linked with longevity through 2005. Further, our results suggest that these widespread, but individually modest-in-size, longevity effects require big data to be discovered—they would go undiscovered in available survey data on the health of older US adults because these survey data are too small.