Diana Kuh

Diana Jane Lewin Kuh
Alma mater	University of Exeter University of Cambridge
Scientific career
Institutions	University College London
Thesis	Assessing the influence of early life on adult health (1993)

Diana Jane Lewin Kuh is a British epidemiologist who is an emeritus professor of Life Course Epidemiology at University College London. She was formerly Scientific Director of the National Survey of Health and Development. Kuh has been consistently named one of the most cited women scientists in the world.

Early life and education

Kuh studied economics at the University of Cambridge. She moved to the University of Exeter, where she worked in the Operational Research Unit using mainframe computer models to allocate funding for healthcare. She then joined the Paediatric Research Unit, where she investigated the health needs of adolescents and young people.

Research and career

In 1987, Kuh started working on the National Survey of Health and Development, a birth cohort study that followed over 5,000 participants from their births in 1946. She became Scientific Director of the National Survey of Health and Development in 2007. Her first work using the cohort study looked to understand the origins of cardiovascular disease and the contributions of early exposure. This became the basis of her doctoral research, earning a PhD at London School of Economics in 1993.

Kuh became interested in women's health in the late nineties. When her cohort study turned 43 years old, they were interviewed by nurses at home. Kuh took this opportunity to understand the menopause transition. Her research showed that breastfeeding, better socioeconomic circumstances and higher cognitive ability children correlated with later menopause. She went on to show the relationship between menopause, bone density and cardiovascular function. She worked with Gita Mishra to study premature and early menopause. Together they showed that women with recurrent risk miscarriages were more likely to experience menopause early, and that Asian women faced a greater risk than other ethnicities. She also showed that later menopause was slightly beneficial to memory.

Kuh co-wrote A Life Course Approach to Women’s Health, which explored the long-term influence of foetal and childhood experience. Her research has shown that early life has a profound impact on adult health, and that disadvantage resulted in accelerated ageing. This included musculoskeletal ageing: childhood adversity, birthweight and attainment of motor milestones were associated with adult grip strength.

Kuh's research takes a life course approach to understanding women's health. She established the Medical Research Council Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing. Her work showed that children born after 1990 were over three times more likely than other generations to be overweight.

She was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015.

Selected publications

• NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC); Erkin Mirrakhimov; George Stergiou; et al. (10 October 2017). "Worldwide trends in body-mass index, underweight, overweight, and obesity from 1975 to 2016: a pooled analysis of 2416 population-based measurement studies in 128·9 million children, adolescents, and adults". The Lancet. 390 (10113): 2627–2642. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32129-3. ISSN 0140-6736. PMC 5735219. PMID 29029897. Wikidata Q45370518.
• Yoav Ben-Shlomo; Diana Kuh (1 April 2002). "A life course approach to chronic disease epidemiology: conceptual models, empirical challenges and interdisciplinary perspectives". International Journal of Epidemiology. 31 (2): 285–293. doi:10.1093/IJE/31.2.285. ISSN 0300-5771. PMID 11980781. Wikidata Q78019925.
• D. Kuh; Y. Ben-Shlomo; J. Lynch; J. Hallqvist; C. Power (1 October 2003). "Life course epidemiology" (PDF). Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. 57 (10): 778–783. doi:10.1136/JECH.57.10.778. ISSN 0143-005X. PMC 1732305. PMID 14573579. Wikidata Q35409893.