Do US Black Women Experience Stress-Related Accelerated Biological Aging?

Human Nature 21 (1):19-38 (2010)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

We hypothesize that black women experience accelerated biological aging in response to repeated or prolonged adaptation to subjective and objective stressors. Drawing on stress physiology and ethnographic, social science, and public health literature, we lay out the rationale for this hypothesis. We also perform a first population-based test of its plausibility, focusing on telomere length, a biomeasure of aging that may be shortened by stressors. Analyzing data from the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN), we estimate that at ages 49–55, black women are 7.5 years biologically “older” than white women. Indicators of perceived stress and poverty account for 27% of this difference. Data limitations preclude assessing objective stressors and also result in imprecise estimates, limiting our ability to draw firm inferences. Further investigation of black-white differences in telomere length using large-population-based samples of broad age range and with detailed measures of environmental stressors is merited

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 103,449

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Gender roles and traits in stress and health.Eric Mayor - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6:135758.
Spermidine maintains telomere length and delays aging.Priyanka Sharma & Rishi Kumar Jaiswal - 2021 - Central Asian Journal of Medical Hypotheses and Ethics 2 (1):51-58.
Stress, Adaptation and Causal Pathways to Mental Health Disparities.Kateryna Maltseva - 2024 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 24 (5):411-435.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-12-01

Downloads
75 (#289,479)

6 months
15 (#168,777)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?