Jay Pearson - Duke University
Race/Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-Based Sample
Date: 02/04/2016 (Thu)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Gross Hall - 270
Organizer: Laura Satterfield
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
Additional Comments: 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 science researchers and cellular biologists, we collected a unique data set of 239 black, white, or Mexican adults from a stratified, multi-stage 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. 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, relational and the products of structurally-rooted bio-psychosocial processes.