Commentary: William Ogilvy Kermack and the childhood origins of adult health and disease

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Abstract
The 1934 Lancet paper by Kermack, McKendrick and McKinlay was a landmark in the discussion of birth cohort influences on adult disease risk. 1 It pre-dated Wade Hampton Frost's paper on cohort influences on tuberculosis mortality, 2 and, whilst it was pre-dated by several demographic analyses highlighting birth cohort influences, 3, 4 was prescient in using these analyses to inform hypotheses regarding early-life exposures and their influence on later disease. As Kermack, McKendrick and McKinlay concluded, the data behaved as if ‘the expectation of life was determined by the conditions which existed during the child's early years’, and concluded, ‘the health of the child is determined by the environmental conditions existing during the years 0–15, and … the health of the man is determined preponderantly by the physical constitution which the child has built up’. 1