HuffPo | The urban poor in the United States are experiencing accelerated
aging at the cellular level, and chronic stress linked both to income
level and racial-ethnic identity is driving this physiological
deterioration.
These are among the findings published
this week by a group of prominent biologists and social researchers,
including a Nobel laureate. Dr. Arline Geronimus, a visiting scholar at
the Stanford Center for Advanced Study and the lead author of the study,
described it as the most rigorous research of its kind examining how
"structurally rooted social processes work through biological mechanisms
to impact health."
What They Found
Researchers
analyzed telomeres of poor and lower middle-class black, white, and
Mexican residents of Detroit. Telomeres are tiny caps at the ends of DNA
strands, akin to the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces, that protect
cells from aging prematurely. Telomeres naturally shorten as people
age. But various types of intense chronic stress are believed to cause
telomeres to shorten, and short telomeres are associated with an array
of serious ailments including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
Evidence
increasingly points to telomere length being highly predictive of
healthy life expectancy. Put simply, "the shorter your telomeres, the greater your chance of dying."
The
new study found that low-income residents of Detroit, regardless of
race, have significantly shorter telomeres than the national average.
"There are effects of living in high-poverty, racially segregated
neighborhoods -- the life experiences people have, the physical
exposures, a whole range of things -- that are just not good for your
health," Geronimus said in an interview with The Huffington Post.
