Race-Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors, and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-based Sample
2015/04/30 by Arline T. Geronimus, Jay A. Pearson, Erin Linnenbringer +6 · 254 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · Medicine · Psychology · #Biopsychosocial model #Climate Change and Health Impacts #Clinical psychology #Demography #Ethnic group #Genetics, Aging, and Longevity in Model Organisms #Gerontology #Medicine #Political science #Population #Poverty #Psychiatry #Psychology #Psychosocial #Race (biology) #Socioeconomic status #Sociology #Stressor #Telomeres, Telomerase, and Senescence
paper · open access · doi:10.1177/0022146515582100
published in Journal of Health and Social Behavior 56(2), 199-224 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2015/04/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Abstract
Residents of distressed urban areas suffer early aging-related disease and excess mortality. Using a community-based participatory research approach in a collaboration between social researchers and cellular biologists, we collected a unique data set of 239 black, white, or Mexican adults from a stratified, multistage probability sample of three Detroit neighborhoods. We drew venous blood and measured telomere length (TL), an indicator of stress-mediated biological aging, linking respondents' TL to their community survey responses. We regressed TL on socioeconomic, psychosocial, neighborhood, and behavioral stressors, hypothesizing and finding an interaction between poverty and racial-ethnic group. Poor whites had shorter TL than nonpoor whites; poor and nonpoor blacks had equivalent TL; and poor Mexicans had longer TL than nonpoor Mexicans. Findings suggest unobserved heterogeneity bias is an important threat to the validity of estimates of TL differences by race-ethnicity. They point to health impacts of social identity as contingent, the products of structurally rooted biopsychosocial processes.
Citations
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