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 · 30 citations
Medicine · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · #Telomeres, Telomerase, and Senescence #Genetics, Aging, and Longevity in Model Organisms #Climate Change and Health Impacts
paper · doi:10.1177/0022146515582100
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.
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