Geronimus Arline T, Pearson Jay A, Linnenbringer Erin, Schulz Amy J, Reyes Angela G, Epel Elissa S, Lin Jue, Blackburn Elizabeth H
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
J Health Soc Behav. 2015 Jun;56(2):199-224. doi: 10.1177/0022146515582100. Epub 2015 Apr 30.
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.
贫困城市地区的居民易患与衰老相关的早期疾病且死亡率过高。通过社会研究人员与细胞生物学家合作采用基于社区的参与性研究方法，我们从底特律三个社区的分层多阶段概率样本中收集了一个独特的数据集，包含239名黑人、白人或墨西哥裔成年人。我们采集静脉血并测量端粒长度（TL），这是压力介导的生物衰老的一个指标，将受访者的端粒长度与他们的社区调查回答联系起来。我们将端粒长度对社会经济、心理社会、社区和行为压力源进行回归分析，假设并发现贫困与种族群体之间存在相互作用。贫困白人的端粒长度比非贫困白人短；贫困和非贫困黑人的端粒长度相当；贫困墨西哥裔的端粒长度比非贫困墨西哥裔长。研究结果表明，未观察到的异质性偏差是按种族估计端粒长度差异有效性的一个重要威胁。这些结果表明社会身份对健康的影响是偶然的，是结构性根源的生物心理社会过程的产物。
