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Poorer people, on average, live shorter lives. This pattern can be seen even in wealthy countries with extensive welfare systems. In Norway, for example, 40-year-old men in the richest 1% could expect to live almost 14 years longer than those in the poorest 1%. In the U.S., the equivalent gap is nearly 15 years. A 2025 World Health Organization report warned that international targets for reducing health inequalities by 2040 are likely to be missed.

Efforts to explain these gaps have often focused on people's circumstances in adulthood, including their income and working conditions. Increasingly, though, researchers have looked further back, to the conditions in which people grow up.

Many studies have followed people from childhood into later life, tracking how their early circumstances relate to their health decades later. Yet the last review to bring together evidence on childhood socioeconomic circumstances and adult death rates was published nearly 20 years ago.

In our recent study published in The Lancet Public Health, my colleagues and I systematically searched for relevant research and brought together the results of 102 long-term studies involving around 8.5 million people in 24 countries. The studies recorded aspects of participants' childhood circumstances, including their parents' occupations or education, household finances and housing, and then tracked deaths in adulthood.

Across 474 separate comparisons, more than 8 in 10 found higher death rates among people who had experienced greater disadvantage in childhood.

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