Journal
JOURNAL OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR
Volume 56, Issue 2, Pages 199-224Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0022146515582100
Keywords
aging; blacks; health disparities; Latinos; neighborhood; poverty; stressors; telomeres; urban; whites
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Funding
- National Institute on Aging [R01 AG032632, T32 AG000221, P30 AG012846]
- National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences [R01 ES014234]
- National Institute of Child Health and Development [R24 HD041028]
- Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford
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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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