Jay Pearson - 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 science researchers and cellular biologists, we collected a unique data set of 239 black, white, or Mexican adults from a stratified, multi-stage 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. 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, relational and the products of structurally-rooted bio-psychosocial processes. #4853