Navigating Black Aging: The Biological Consequences of Stress and Depression
UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of Population and Quantitative Health SciencesDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2021-12-07Keywords
Biological age accelerationCARDIA
Depression symptoms
High effort coping
Social support
Epidemiology
Gerontology
Health Services Research
Mental and Social Health
Psychiatry and Psychology
Psychology
Race and Ethnicity
UMCCTS funding
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Show full item recordAbstract
OBJECTIVES: Black persons in the US are more likely to suffer from social inequality. Chronic stress caused by social inequality and racial discrimination results in weathering of the body that causes physiological dysregulation and biological age being higher than chronological age (accelerated aging). Depression has been linked to both racial discrimination and accelerated aging and accelerated aging has been demonstrated to be higher in Black than White persons, on average. However, we know little about accelerated aging across the life course in Black Americans. METHODS: We used mixed effects growth models to measure biological age acceleration, measured with cardiometabolic markers, over a 20-year period in Black participants of the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study (CARDIA) who were aged 27 - 42 years at analytic baseline. We included an interaction between depressive symptoms and time to determine whether risk of depression was associated with a faster rate of biological aging. RESULTS: We found that the rate of biological aging increased over a 20-year span and that those at risk for depression had a faster rate of biological aging than those not at risk. We also found that various social factors were associated with biological age acceleration over time. DISCUSSION: Given the known association between perceived racial discrimination and depressive symptoms, we provide a novel instance of the long-term effects of social inequality. Specifically, biological age acceleration, a marker of physiological dysregulation, is associated with time among Black persons and more strongly associated among those with depressive symptoms.Source
Forrester SN, Whitfield KE, Kiefe CI, Thorpe RJ. Navigating Black Aging: The Biological Consequences of Stress and Depression. J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci. 2021 Dec 7:gbab224. doi: 10.1093/geronb/gbab224. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34875069. Link to article on publisher's site
DOI
10.1093/geronb/gbab224Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/47004PubMed ID
34875069Related Resources
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© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.Distribution License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1093/geronb/gbab224
Scopus Count
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.