Environmental racism may accelerate aging in black Americans: study

B.Deprived Americans living in areas with lower incomes and lower education levels may age faster than their white neighbors, according to a new study. This is true even if individual blacks have higher incomes or higher levels of education. This highlights how much an individual’s environment can affect their health.

of studyThe paper, published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, builds on a new body of research related to accelerated biological aging as measured by a process called senescence. DNA methylation (DNAm), a term that includes low socioeconomic status, i.e. education, income and wealth. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have shown for the first time how the region in which a person lives can contribute to racial disparities in accelerated aging, even after adjusting for an individual’s socioeconomic status. . The researchers found that 21% of racial disparities in one DNAm measure could be explained by living in “disadvantaged” neighborhoods (areas with a high proportion of low-income residents, among other factors).

Cory McMillan, one of the study’s co-authors and an associate professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, said it’s well established that some people age at a different pace than others. However, new research “addresses some of the environmental pressures that contribute to differences in the rate of aging that blacks are more frequently exposed to due to structural factors such as environmental racism.”

This is a phenomenon known as ‘weathering’, the premature biological aging experienced by people in marginalized communities as a result of stressors such as racism and poverty. It is associated with worsening health conditions such as: high blood pressure and mental illness High infant and maternal mortality rates. STAT reported last year Studies show that the brains of black Americans age faster than those of white and Hispanic adults, showing signs of dementia on MRI scans early in middle age.

A new study aimed to better elucidate the environmental factors that contribute to weathering.researchers have found that PM2.5 pollution The amount of very fine particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter in the air has a much greater impact on accelerated aging in black Americans than in white Americans exposed to the same pollution. The researchers said, “deprivation of the neighborhood— metrics that measure, for example, the percentage of people with less than 12 years of education who live in a particular neighborhood, or the percentage of people who do not own a car or live in overcrowded apartments.

It is unclear whether the differences in the effects of air pollution on aging are due to the greater susceptibility of black participants to pollution, or to higher exposures in ways not described in this study. The authors point out that it is unknown. Having a history of lung disease or asthma (a disease that disproportionately affects communities of color) can make you more vulnerable.

Lead author Isabel Yanatos added, “The cumulative effects of disadvantage and discrimination can lead to greater stress, and as a result, someone’s body may not be able to cope with air pollution either.” There is,” he said.

Other factors that can affect the level of air pollution people are exposed to, even if they live in the same area, include how much time they spend outdoors, whether they have air conditioning or air filters, and what type of job or home they have. , length of stay, etc. “I used to live in the neighborhood,” said Yanatos, a neuroscience doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania.

The study focused on data from 2,960 Americans aged 50 and over drawn from: Health and Retirement Research, a longitudinal cohort study examining a representative sample of approximately 20,000 people across the United States. Some of these participants submitted blood samples in 2016. The researchers analyzed these samples for patterns of DNA methylation, a biological process that can alter DNA activity. level of gene expression. Researchers surveyed DNAm data, surveys, and neighborhoods based on participants’ zip codes to analyze how neighborhood and environmental factors contribute to racial disparities in epigenetic aging. We used two statistical approaches.

This study has other limitations. The authors point out that there are major problems in the whole field of social epigenetics. It is the lack of longitudinal DNAm data that follows participants over longer periods of time rather than just at one point in time.

“People who live in poor neighborhoods that have been exposed to air pollution all their lives would expect to look very different from someone who recently moved into the neighborhood,” says Gloria Faijon-Graf. . Although she was a doctoral candidate in epidemiology at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, she was not involved in the study. “Especially in a gentrifying area? And people who migrate are wealthier than those who have traditionally lived there.”

According to Emily Schantz, Ph.D., the results of this kind of place-based study are also not entirely generalizable. Candidate to study Health Geography at the University of Waterloo. Social systems, with their own environmental, social and cultural norms, behave differently in different places, she told STAT in an email.

Schantz plans to target other regions of the country and other races and ethnicities to see if there are changes in the impact on accelerated aging and how much each factor contributes to inequality. He said it would be interesting to see similar studies done.

“The human body doesn’t live in a vacuum. It’s constantly interacting with all aspects of the environment,” she said. “Based on decades of research, largely by black feminist scholars, we know that identities and social contexts are not additive but informal.”

Future research using a more cross-cutting approach that reflects these nuanced experiences is also on the authors’ wish list. While it is as important as it is to quantify the extent to which environmental factors contribute to weathering, other structural and social factors contribute to the aging of marginalized groups such as black women. The authors note that it is important to recognize how different These may include differences in access and quality of health care, as well as other forms of discrimination and environmental racism.

“My hope is that as a field and as a society, we start to take these environmental and neighborhood factors seriously, not just on an individual level, but as one of the factors that promote health,” Janatos said. said. Establishing links between inhabited areas and individual health provides the basis for regional, large-scale policy interventions that can “prevent some of these health problems and health inequalities from arising”. she hopes to build