Race-Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors, and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-based Sample.
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.
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA arline@umich.edu.
Arline T
AT
Geronimus
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Jay A
JA
Pearson
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA.
Erin
E
Linnenbringer
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Amy J
AJ
Schulz
Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation, Detroit, MI, USA.
Angela G
AG
Reyes
University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Elissa S
ES
Epel
University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Jue
J
Lin
University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Elizabeth H
EH
Blackburn
D000328:Adult; D001741:Black or African American; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D017058:Mexican Americans; D008824:Michigan; D008875:Middle Aged; D011203:Poverty; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D016615:Telomere; D014505:Urban Population; D044465:White People
Latinos; aging; blacks; health disparities; neighborhood; poverty; stressors; telomeres; urban; whites