In this project, we are investigating the multiple layers of childhood adversity that generate inequality over the life course and across generations with an aim to break vicious circles of adversity and to identify children and families who would benefit from targeted support.
 

Childhood is a sensitive period with rapid growth and development, and adversity during this period may have long-lasting health effects. More important, multiple forms of adversity intersect with each other, and disadvantaged children are often exposed to adversity across multiple biological, health, social, neighbourhood, and environmental layers. However, the literature on childhood adversity has almost exclusively focused on social adversity. This is a major gap in our understanding, and there is a lack of empirical data that transcends multitude layers of adversity and follows individuals over the entire life course or across generations.

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LAYERS is meeting this challenge by creating a unified data infrastructure for life-course analyses of multiple layers of childhood adversity in 2 million people over three generations. This infrastructure is being combined with an interdisciplinary fusion of methods from data science, epidemiology, econometrics, and systems science within the health-complexity framework. This innovative combination of data and methods allows for a systematic generation of knowledge about the patterns of health inequality that emerge in early life and which transcend generations, the mechanisms that generate these patterns, and the dynamics that make them change over time.

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The project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC Consolidator Grant).

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Principal investigator: Professor Naja Hulvej Rod

Coordinator: Postdoc René de Vries

 

Key publications:

 

• Rod NH (2023). "The multiple layers of health inequality". The Lancet Public Health 8(2): e86–e87. Link
   

• Elsenburg LK, Rieckmann A, Nguyen T-L, Bengtsson J, Andersen AN, Taylor-Robinson D, Lange T, Rod NH (2022). "Mediation of the parental education gradient in early adult mortality by childhood adversity: a population-based cohort study of more than 1 million children". The Lancet Public Health 7(2): e146–e155. Link
   

• Rod NH, Bengtsson J, Elsenburg LK, Taylor-Robinson D, Rieckmann A (2022). "Hospitalisation patterns among children exposed to childhood adversities: a population-based cohort study of half a million children". The Lancet Public Health 6(11): e826–e835. Link
   

• Rod NH, Bengtsson J, Budtz-Jørgensen E, Clipet-Jensen C, Taylor-Robinson D, Nybo Andersen AM, PhD, Dich N, Rieckmann A (2020). "Trajectories of childhood adversity and mortality in early adulthood: A population-based cohort study". The Lancet 396: 489–497. Link