University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA.
J Health Soc Behav. 2021 Sep;62(3):436-453. doi: 10.1177/00221465211009309.
Research on biological embedding of the social environment has been expedited by increased availability of biomarkers. Recently, this arsenal of measures has been expanded to include epigenetic clocks that indicate in years the extent to which an individual is older or younger than their chronological age. These measures of biological aging, especially GrimAge, are robust predictors of both illness and time to death. Importantly for sociologists, several studies have linked social conditions to these indices of aging. The present study extends this research using longitudinal data from a sample of 223 black women participating in the Family and Community Health Study. We find that changes in income and living arrangements over an 11-year period predict changes in speed of biological aging. These results provide further support for the idea that epigenetic aging is a mechanism whereby social conditions become biologically embedded. The utility of epigenetic clocks for sociological studies of health are discussed.
生物嵌入社会环境的研究因生物标志物的可用性增加而得到加速。最近，这一措施的武器库已经扩大到包括表观遗传时钟，这些时钟以年为单位表示一个人比其实际年龄老或年轻的程度。这些生物衰老的衡量标准，特别是 GrimAge，是疾病和死亡时间的强有力预测指标。对社会学家来说重要的是，有几项研究已经将社会条件与这些衰老指标联系起来。本研究使用参与家庭和社区健康研究的 223 名黑人女性样本的纵向数据扩展了这项研究。我们发现，在 11 年期间收入和生活安排的变化预测了生物衰老速度的变化。这些结果进一步支持了这样一种观点，即表观遗传衰老是社会条件在生物学上嵌入的一种机制。讨论了表观遗传时钟在健康社会学研究中的效用。
