"When Arline Geronimus was a student at Princeton University in the late 1970s, she worked a part-time job at a school for pregnant teenagers in Trenton, N.J. She quickly noticed that the teenagers at that part-time job were suffering from chronic health conditions that her whiter, better-off Princeton classmates rarely experienced. Geronimus began to wonder: how much of the health problems that the young mothers in Trenton experienced were caused by the stresses of their environment?
It was later, during her graduate studies, that Geronimus came up with the term weathering — a metaphor, she thought, for what she saw happening to their bodies..."
This article talks about the concept of "weathering" or, as I see it, premature aging due to stress in black women compared to white women (likely not exclusive to women, but the article focused on women). The article also talks about DNA changes via methylation which affects how the DNA functions.
There is data that blacks have, on average, higher ACE scores than whites (disclosure--I am white). Slopen's Harvard article looked at the following adversities:
1. financial hardship;
2. parental divorce/separation;
3. parental death;
4. parental imprisonment;
5. witness to domestic violence;
6. victim or witness of neighborhood violence;
7. lived with mentally ill/suicidal person;
8. lived with someone with alcohol/drug problem; and
9. treated unfairly because of race/ethnicity.
The average score for whites was 0.9 for blacks 1.27. I wonder how much adversity in general rather than just from discrimination is at play here. Of course, it would be fantastic if someone could, or already has, determined the attributable risk of ACEs on maternal outcomes (e.g. death, stroke, etc.) and infant outcomes (death, disability, prematurity).
Looking forward to any comments!. Thanks to Skip Brown for sharing this article with me!
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