Trend Toward Older Maternal Age Contributed To Growing Racial Inequity In Very-Low-Birthweight Infants In The US.

In 2016 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that for the first time, US women in their thirties were bearing more children than those in their twenties. Analyzing US vital statistics data from the period 1989-2019, we simulated the effect that the distributional shift to older maternal ages at first birth had on health inequity between Black and White infants. Net of maternal socioeconomic indicators, this shift increased the relative odds that White women gave birth to very-low-birthweight (VLBW) infants by 10 percent, versus 19 percent for Black women, largely accounting for the rise in VLBW and the increase in racial inequity seen in the years analyzed.

US Black-White Differences in Mortality Risk Among Transgender and Cisgender People in Private Insurance, 2011-2019.

To compare survival by gender and race among transgender and cisgender people enrolled in private insurance in the United States between 2011 and 2019. We examined Optum's Clinformatics Data Mart Database. We identified transgender enrollees using claims related to gender-affirming care.

Differences in All-Cause Mortality Among Transgender and Non-Transgender People Enrolled in Private Insurance.

Few studies have analyzed mortality rates among transgender (trans) populations in the United States and compared them to the rates of non-trans populations. Using private insurance data from 2011 to 2019, we estimated age-specific all-cause mortality rates among a subset of trans people enrolled in private insurance and compared them to a 10% randomly selected non-trans cohort. Overall, we found that trans people were nearly twice as likely to die over the period as their non-trans counterparts.

Stigmatizing Policies Interact with Mental Health and Sexual Behaviours to Structurally Induce HIV Diagnoses Among European Men Who Have Sex with Men.

Structural stigma shapes men who have sex with men's (MSM's) mental health and sexual behaviours. The aim of this study was to examine how stigmatizing policies interact with downstream anxiety/depression and sexual behaviours to structurally pattern HIV disparities among European MSM. We conducted a secondary data analysis of the European Men-who-have-sex-with-men Internet Survey (EMIS) from 2017.

The Weight of Migration: Reconsidering Health Selection and Return Migration among Mexicans.

While migration plays a key role in shaping the health of Mexican migrants in the US and those in Mexico, contemporary Mexican migration trends may challenge the health selection and return migration hypotheses, two prevailing assumptions of how migration shapes health. Using data from the Mexican Family Life Survey (2002; 2005), we tested these two hypotheses by comparing the cardiometabolic health profiles of (1) Mexico-US future migrants and nonmigrants and (2) Mexico-US return migrants and nonmigrants. First, we found limited evidence for health selection: the cardiometabolic health of Mexico-US future migrants was not measurably better than the health of their compatriots who did not migrate, although migrants differed demographically from nonmigrants.

The Political Realignment of Health: How Partisan Power Shaped Infant Health in the United States, 1915-2017.

The US two-party system was transformed in the 1960s when the Democratic Party abandoned its Jim Crow protectionism to incorporate the policy agenda fostered by the civil rights movement, and the Republican Party redirected its platform toward socioeconomic and racial conservatism. The authors argue that the policy agendas promoted by the two parties through presidents and state legislatures codify a racially patterned access to resources and power detrimental to the health of all. To test the hypothesis that fluctuations in overall and race-specific infant mortality rates (IMRs) shift between the parties in power before and after the political realignment (PR), the authors apply panel data analysis methods to state-level data from the National Center for Health Statistics for the period 1915 through 2017.

Partisan Control of U.S. State Governments: Politics as a Social Determinant of Infant Health.

Introduction: State policies and programs affect population health; yet, little is known about the connections between health and the political institutions and actors that prescribe and execute those policies and programs.

Methods: The 2-way fixed-effects regression models were fitted to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, 1969-2014, to estimate logged infant mortality rate differentials between Republican- and non-Republican‒controlled state legislatures. These data were used in 2020 to hypothesize that net of trend, fluctuations in infant mortality rates-overall and by race-correlate with the party that controls state legislatures (the Lower House, the Upper House, and Congress).

Coming up short: Comparing venous blood, dried blood spots & saliva samples for measuring telomere length in health equity research.

Background: Telomere length (TL) in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from fresh venous blood is increasingly used to estimate molecular impacts of accumulated social adversity on population health. Sometimes, TL extracted from saliva or dried blood spots (DBS) are substituted as less invasive and more scalable specimen collection methods; yet, are they interchangeable with fresh blood? Studies find TL is correlated across tissues, but have not addressed the critical question for social epidemiological applications: Do different specimen types show the same association between TL and social constructs?

Methods: We integrate expertise in social epidemiology, molecular biology, and the statistical impact of measurement error on parameter estimates. Recruiting a diverse sample of 132 Metro-Detroit women, we measure TL for each woman from fresh blood PBMC, DBS, and saliva.

State-Level Policy Stigma and Non-Prescribed Hormones Use among Trans Populations in the United States: A Mediational Analysis of Insurance and Anticipated Stigma.

Background: Medical gender affirmation (i.e., hormone use) is one-way transgender (trans) people affirm their gender and has been associated with health benefits.

Weathering in Detroit: Place, Race, Ethnicity, and Poverty as Conceptually Fluctuating Social Constructs Shaping Variation in Allostatic Load.

Unlabelled: Policy Points Despite 30 years of attention to eliminating population health inequity, it remains entrenched, calling for new approaches. Targeted universalism, wellness-based local development, and Jedi Public Health approaches that are community informed, evidence based, and focused on improving everyday settings and diverse lived experiences are important policy directions. State and federal revenue transfers are necessary to mitigate the harms of austerity and assure greater equity in fiscal and population health in places like Detroit, Michigan.

Associations between breast cancer subtype and neighborhood socioeconomic and racial composition among Black and White women.

Purpose: Studies of Black-White differences in breast cancer subtype often emphasize potential ancestry-associated genetic or lifestyle risk factors without fully considering how the social or economic implications of race in the U.S. may influence risk.

SYSTEMATICALLY SHORTCHANGED, YET CARRYING ON: Black Adolescent Girls in the Detroit Metropolitan School Reform Environment.

School reform policies, such as the closure of "low-performing" schools and the competitive introduction of school choice and charters, were presented to communities of color as the fix to educational inequities and the lifeline needed for urban Black students to have a chance at a quality education and social mobility. The ways in which reforms have under-delivered on this promise, and in some cases exacerbated negative academic outcomes, particularly for Black boys, are documented. Yet, research on the experience of Black adolescent girls is sparse.

Cortisol and Racial Health Disparities Affecting Black Men in Later Life: Evidence From MIDUS II.

In the United States, Black men have poorer overall health and shorter life spans than most other racial/ethnic groups of men, largely attributable to chronic health conditions. Dysregulated patterns of daily cortisol, an indicator of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress-response functioning, are linked to poor health outcomes. Questions remain regarding whether and how cortisol contributes to Black-White differences in men's health.

Weathering, Drugs, and Whack-a-Mole: Fundamental and Proximate Causes of Widening Educational Inequity in U.S. Life Expectancy by Sex and Race, 1990-2015.

Discussion of growing inequity in U.S. life expectancy increasingly focuses on the popularized narrative that it is driven by a surge of "deaths of despair.

Energy Efficiency as Energy Justice: Addressing Racial Inequities through Investments in People and Places.

Structural racism in the form of racial residential segregation and the series of laws, policies and practices that continue to reinforce it, has robbed generations of African Americans of socioeconomic opportunity, wealth accumulation, safe, secure or energy-efficient housing, and full societal inclusion. Research indicates that African Americans are more likely to live in older, energy inefficient homes with structural deficiencies, outdated appliances and faulty energy systems. These conditions lead to a disproportionate burden of energy insecurity, defined as "the inability to adequately meet household energy needs" among African Americans across the economic spectrum.

Life Course Approaches to the Causes of Health Disparities.

Reducing health disparities requires an understanding of the mechanisms that generate disparities. Life course approaches to health disparities leverage theories that explain how socially patterned physical, environmental, and socioeconomic exposures at different stages of human development shape health within and across generations and can therefore offer substantial insight into the etiology of health disparities. Life course approaches are informed by developmental and structural perspectives.

America's Declining Well-Being, Health, and Life Expectancy: Not Just a White Problem.

Although recent declines in life expectancy among non-Hispanic Whites, coined "deaths of despair," grabbed the headlines of most major media outlets, this is neither a recent problem nor is it confined to Whites. The decline in America's health has been described in the public health literature for decades and has long been hypothesized to be attributable to an array of worsening psychosocial problems that are not specific to Whites. To test some of the dominant hypotheses, we show how various measures of despair have been increasing in the United States since 1980 and how these trends relate to changes in health and longevity.

Black-White Disparities in Breast Cancer Subtype: The Intersection of Socially Patterned Stress and Genetic Expression.

Hormone receptor negative (HR-) breast cancer subtypes are etiologically distinct from the more common, less aggressive, and more treatable form of estrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast cancer. Numerous population-based studies have found that, in the United States, Black women are 2 to 3 times more likely to develop HR- breast cancer than White women. Much of the existing research on racial disparities in breast cancer subtype has focused on identifying predisposing genetic factors associated with African ancestry.

Change in birth outcomes among infants born to Latina mothers after a major immigration raid.

Background: Growing evidence indicates that immigration policy and enforcement adversely affect the well-being of Latino immigrants, but fewer studies examine 'spillover effects' on USA-born Latinos. Immigration enforcement is often diffuse, covert and difficult to measure. By contrast, the federal immigration raid in Postville, Iowa, in 2008 was, at the time, the largest single-site federal immigration raid in US history.

The Best of Intentions: A Structural Analysis of the Association between Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Unintended Pregnancy in a Sample of Mothers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979).

Objectives: Births to less educated women are more likely to be classified as unintended than other births. We question a common interpretation that this association reflects a lack of contraceptive knowledge or self-efficacy among less educated women. We theorize that differences in early life educational advantages structure pregnancy desires and the salience and opportunity costs of precise fertility timing.

Racial Discrimination, John Henryism, and Depression Among African Americans.

Evidence from previous studies indicates that racial discrimination is significantly associated with depression and that African Americans with higher levels of socioeconomic status (SES) report greater exposure to racial discrimination compared to those with lower SES levels. Coping strategies could alter the relationship between racial discrimination and depression among African Americans. This study first examined whether greater levels of SES were associated with increased reports of racial discrimination and ratings of John Henryism, a measure of high-effort coping, among African Americans.

Jedi Public Health: Co-creating an Identity-Safe Culture to Promote Health Equity.

The extent to which socially-assigned and culturally mediated social identity affects health depends on contingencies of social identity that vary across and within populations in day-to-day life. These contingencies are structurally rooted and health damaging inasmuch as they activate physiological stress responses. They also have adverse effects on cognition and emotion, undermining self-confidence and diminishing academic performance.

Measuring Recent Apparent Declines In Longevity: The Role Of Increasing Educational Attainment.

Independent researchers have reported an alarming decline in life expectancy after 1990 among US non-Hispanic whites with less than a high school education. However, US educational attainment rose dramatically during the twentieth century; thus, focusing on changes in mortality rates of those not completing high school means looking at a different, shrinking, and increasingly vulnerable segment of the population in each year. We analyzed US data to examine the robustness of earlier findings categorizing education in terms of relative rank in the overall distribution of each birth cohort, instead of by credentials such as high school graduation.