Race-Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors, and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-based Sample.
Journal Article (Journal Article)
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.
Full Text
Duke Authors
Cited Authors
- Geronimus, AT; Pearson, JA; Linnenbringer, E; Schulz, AJ; Reyes, AG; Epel, ES; Lin, J; Blackburn, EH
Published Date
- June 2015
Published In
Volume / Issue
- 56 / 2
Start / End Page
- 199 - 224
PubMed ID
- 25930147
Pubmed Central ID
- PMC4621968
Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)
- 2150-6000
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
- 0022-1465
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
- 10.1177/0022146515582100
Language
- eng