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Life-course approaches are needed to foster equitable healthy aging

Nature Aging volume 5, pages 952–955 (2025)Cite this article

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The adoption of life-course approaches in health policy and practice has historically been limited, even though these approaches show promise in tackling global health challenges and inequities related to healthy aging. In this Comment, we discuss the importance of life-course approaches and actions needed to support their adoption.

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Fig. 1: Life-course processes of inequities in healthy aging and examples of policies to tackle healthy aging inequities using a life-course approach.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sydney School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Anita van Zwieten, J. Jaime Miranda & Saman Khalatbari-Soltani

  2. Centre for Kidney Research, The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Westmead, New South Wales, Australia

    Anita van Zwieten

  3. Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA), Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health, School of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Suraj Samtani

  4. Sydney Pharmacy School, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Mouna Sawan

  5. Mental Wealth Initiative, Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Jo-An Occhipinti

  6. CRONICAS Centre of Excellence in Chronic Diseases, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Lima, Peru

    J. Jaime Miranda

Authors
  1. Anita van Zwieten
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  2. Suraj Samtani
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  3. Mouna Sawan
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  4. Jo-An Occhipinti
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  5. J. Jaime Miranda
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  6. Saman Khalatbari-Soltani
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Contributions

A.v.Z. and S.K.-S. conceived the idea, designed, structured and wrote the first draft, and revised the manuscript. All other authors provided critical feedback on the draft and contributed to the design, structure, drafting and revisions. All authors have approved the versions of the manuscript submitted or resubmitted.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Saman Khalatbari-Soltani.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Aging thanks S. Jay Olshansky and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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van Zwieten, A., Samtani, S., Sawan, M. et al. Life-course approaches are needed to foster equitable healthy aging. Nat Aging 5, 952–955 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-025-00875-5

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