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How can we strengthen lifecycle health and well-being?
Our Vision
The vision of the THRIVE Change Lab is to develop a health promotion and knowledge mobilisation tool to improve lifecycle health, which could aid early and personalised interventions and supports to enable all children to reach their full potential.
What is THRIVE?
We are a group of people from different disciplines who came together in March 2018 with a shared goal to work Towards Human Resilience in Varying Environments (THRIVE).
What does this mean?
Through our Change Lab, we aim to understand how social, biomedical and environmental factors experienced in early life shape the developmental and health paths of the child, and how we can bring this information together to develop or improve strategies to support good health and well-being across the lifecycle.
What is a Change Lab?
Change labs are collaborative spaces or processes that foster innovation, co-creation, and capacity building amongst diverse knowledge users to address complex, systemic challenges.
Key features of change labs include:
A systems focus, going beyond disciplinary and methodological silos and symptoms,
Diverse participation, to ask better questions and bring unique perspectives,
Iterative processes for prototyping, testing and refining ideas and solutions,
Safe space for experimentation and risk-taking,
Outcome-oriented, to generate actionable solutions, interventions, or policies for real-world implementation
Our work is grounded in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD), which is a framework that explores how early life environments and experiences influence an individual’s lifelong health (1). The framework takes a holistic approach, considering how social and environmental determinants of health, and biological mechanisms of disease, interact to set health trajectories (1,2). Within the context of THRIVE, the DOHaD framework informs our understanding of: 1. the various factors—physical, social and biomedical—and their significance, that shape health trajectories, 2. the critical windows we might target to enhance resiliency and prevent disease, and 3. how we can improve and personalise interventions to support lifelong and transgenerational health and well-being.
Because DOHaD is a complex field and there is urgent need to prevent and reduce the burden of chronic diseases and conditions (3), and because the return on investing in early life is high (4), a change lab is the ideal way to co-create new solutions that support all children to THRIVE!
Why is our work needed?
A massive body of evidence shows that early environments, exposures, and experiences shape the development and occurrence of health disorders and chronic conditions. Yet our ability to harness and use this knowledge before irreversible processes affect health trajectories remains severely limited.
Why?
We have limited ability to predict health trajectories early
Interventions are not personalised, and do not consider lifecycle, biomedical, social, and environmental determinants frameworks
Participation from multiple knowledge users in health decision-making is rare
Our Mission
To better integrate this evidence into a health promotion and knowledge mobilisation tool for accurate and personalised decision-making support for individuals, parents, caregivers and policymakers that will strengthen lifelong health and well-being for individuals and populations.
References
1. Hoffman D et al. (2021) Developmental Origins of Metabolic Diseases. Phys Revs 101:739-795.
2. Abdul-Hussein A et al. (2021) Early life risk and resiliency factors and their influences on developmental outcomes and disease pathways: a rapid evidence review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. J DOHaD 12:357-372.
3. Jacob and Hanson (2020) Implications of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease concept for policy-making. Curr Opin Endo and Metabol Res 13:20-27
4. Heckman J. The economics of human potential. https://heckmanequation.org
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