What do we have to know from migrants' past exposures to understand their health status? a life course approach

The incorporation of a life course perspective into a conceptual framework of migrant health enables the consideration of risk factors and disease outcomes over the different life phases of migrants, which is necessary to understand the health situation of migrants and their offspring. Comparison populations need to be carefully selected depending on the study questions under consideration within the life course framework.Migrant health research will benefit from an approach using a life course perspective. A critique of the theoretical foundations of migrant health research is essential for further developing both the theoretical framework of migrant health and related empirical studies.Both the absolute numbers of migrants as well as their proportion of the total population are increasing in western European countries and the USA. In 2005, western and central European countries hosted more than 44 million foreign-born persons [1]. The health of migrants has been extensively studied. However, studies about health differences between migrants and majority populations face a fundamental problem: a broadly accepted comprehensive and conclusive model on migrants and their health is lacking [2]. Existing concepts of migrant health, such as the healthy migrant model [3,4], the health transition model [5] or the model developed by Schenk [6], include several important factors, but do not offer a life course perspective that takes into account the influence of health-related factors acting in the different life periods of migrants [7]. In other words, they lack an explicit time axis. The question arising from this lack of a time axis is: Which factors and exposures in the life course of migrants do we have to consider in migrant studies in order to understand adequately the current health situation of migrants? To answer this question, we use the approach of life course epidemiology. Our focus is on developing a framework for epidemiological migrant studies. Other forms of