Publications by authors named "Frederick X Gibbons"

Introduction: Black people are disproportionately burdened by tobacco-related diseases and are less successful at cigarette cessation with current treatments. We know little about the effectiveness of e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation method compared to currently approved methods in Black adults who smoke. Many Black adults report experiencing racial discrimination in health care, but if discrimination is related to utilization of smoking cessation aids including e-cigarettes and success with smoking cessation in this population is unclear.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The study analyzed 685 Black adults aged around 57 to see how loneliness and income affect accelerated aging using a new DNA-methylation index called DunedinPACE.
  • - Findings showed that as people aged, their rate of physiological aging increased, and changes in loneliness and income significantly impacted this aging over an 11-year period.
  • - Importantly, while smoking behavior was also linked to aging, loneliness and income still had strong effects even after controlling for other factors like smoking and alcohol use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Excessive alcohol consumption (EAC) is linked to serious health outcomes and epigenetic aging (EA), but self-reported measures of EAC often show inconsistent results, highlighting the need for better assessment tools.
  • New DNA methylation indices like the Alcohol T Score (ATS) and Methyl DetectR (MDR), along with the carbohydrate deficient transferrin (CDT), were tested to evaluate their effectiveness in measuring EAC's impact on EA in a study with 437 young Black American adults.
  • Findings revealed that non-self-report indices (ATS, MDR, and CDT) had significant correlations with EA and immune cell counts, while self-reports showed weak connections; notably, the ATS demonstrated a strong predictive capacity
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Black communities are targeted by more cigarette advertisements than White communities and racial discrimination among Black people is related to cigarette use. However, little is known about these factors with non-cigarette tobacco product use among Black adults. Therefore, this study assessed the association of non-cigarette advertisement exposure and racial discrimination with use of non-cigarette tobacco products among Black adults.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate racial centrality as a mediator of the association between Black adolescents' racial discrimination experiences and their cigarette use in early adulthood.

Methods: The data were drawn from the Family and Community Health Study, which is a longitudinal study of Black American families that began in 1996. Families with a child in 5th grade who identified as Black or African American were recruited from Iowa and Georgia.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Smoking and Heavy Alcohol Consumption (HAC) are established risk factors for myriad complex disorders of ageing. Yet many prior studies of Epigenetic Ageing (EA) have shown only modest effects of smoking and drinking on accelerated ageing. One potential reason for this conundrum might be the reliance of some prior EA studies on self-reported substance use, which may be unreliable in many samples.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: While numerous studies have documented the power of new generation epigenetic clocks to predict morbidity and mortality, research regarding the causes of variation in speed of epigenetic aging is in the early stages. To the extent that these epigenetic clocks are robust measures of biological aging, they should be sensitive to various nutritional, behavioral, ecological, and social factors that have been shown to affect health.

Objective: Investigate over an 11-year period the extent to which changes in socioeconomic stress and lifestyle predict changes in speed of epigenetic aging among a sample of middle-aged African American women.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative aims to understand the mechanisms influencing psychopathology through a dimensional approach. Limited research thus far has considered potential racial/ethnic differences in RDoC constructs that are influenced by developmental and contextual processes. A growing body of research has demonstrated that racial trauma is a pervasive chronic stressor that impacts the health of Black Americans across the life course.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We expand upon prior work (Gibbons et al., ) relating childhood stressor effects, particularly harsh childhood environments, to risky behavior and ultimately physical health by adding longer-term outcomes - deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) methylation-based measures of accelerated aging (DNA-aging). Further, following work on the effects of early exposure to danger (McLaughlin et al.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Given the potential for unintended pregnancy and exposure to sexually transmitted infections, both of which can have long-term deleterious health consequences, the identification of predictors of adolescent risky sexual behavior remains an important line of inquiry. Although prior research has identified a variety of family and individual factors that are associated with risky sexual behavior, few studies have examined the role of family economic stress. The current study utilized three waves of data from a community sample of African American families with adolescents (N = 778, 54% girls, average age = 10.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Methylation of is involved in the regulation of the stress response and is influenced by early stress exposure. Two CpG sites, cg20813374 and cg00130530, have been identified as potential reporters of early stress. We examined whether methylation was associated with accelerated DNA methylation ageing and indirectly predicted poorer cardiovascular health among both young adult and middle-aged Black Americans.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Evolving patterns of nicotine and cannabis use by adolescents require new tools to understand the changing epidemiology of these substances. Here we describe the use of a novel epigenetic biomarker sensitive to both tobacco and cannabis smoke in a longitudinal sample of high-risk adolescents. We examine risk factors for positivity for this epigenetic biomarker in comparison to positivity for conventional serum biomarkers of nicotine and cannabis use.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Numerous studies have found evidence of a link between perceived discrimination and unhealthy behavior, especially substance use. Within this body of literature, however, several studies have found unexpected evidence of a positive relation between perceived racial discrimination among African Americans-mostly women-and certain types of healthy behavior, primarily exercise and healthy eating. The current study further examined this positive relation, including an anticipated moderator: optimism.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mortality assessments are conducted for both civil and commercial purposes. Recent advances in epigenetics have resulted in DNA methylation tools to assess risk and aid in this task. However, widely available array-based algorithms are not readily translatable into clinical tools and do not provide a good foundation for clinical recommendations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The weathering hypothesis suggests that Black Americans face higher rates of health issues due to stressors related to race, such as structural barriers and discrimination, rather than just lifestyle choices.
  • This study examines how factors like education, income, neighborhood conditions, and discrimination contribute to accelerated aging in African Americans, using the GrimAge index to measure aging.
  • Results show that while adversity predicts accelerated aging, marriage tends to slow it down, and health behaviors like diet and exercise do not mediate the impact of these stressors on health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Racial socialization is a culturally relevant parenting strategy known to combat the detrimental consequences of racial discrimination for African American youth. Three limitations hinder our developmental understanding of the racial socialization process. Few studies have accounted for the combination of messages that primary caregivers convey, examined how these messages change over time, or investigated how caregivers and adolescents experiences with racial discrimination predict change in the combination of messages conveyed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The initiation of adolescent smoking is difficult to detect using carbon monoxide or cotinine assays. Previously, we and others have shown that the methylation of cg05575921 is an accurate predictor of adult smoking status. But the dose and time dependency of the demethylation response to smoking initiation in adolescents is not yet well understood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Epigenetic aging (EA) indices are frequently used as predictors of mortality and other important health outcomes. However, each of the commonly used array-based indices has significant heritable components which could tag ethnicity and potentially confound comparisons across racial and ethnic groups. To determine if this was possible, we examined the relationship of DNA methylation in cord blood from 203 newborns (112 African American (AA) and 91 White) at the 513 probes from the Levine PhenoAge Epigenetic Aging index to ethnicity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

It is widely accepted that socioeconomic status (SES) is a fundamental cause of health inequality. There is evidence, however, that race is also a fundamental cause of disparities in health. Based on this idea, the weathering hypothesis developed by Geronimus and her colleagues views the elevated rates of illness and disability seen among Black Americans as a physiological response to the structural barriers, daily slights, and other threats to identity that comprise the Black experience.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Identifying the mechanisms linking early experiences, genetic risk factors, and their interaction with later health consequences is central to the development of preventive interventions and identifying potential boundary conditions for their efficacy. In the current investigation of 412 African American adolescents followed across a 20-year period, we examined change in body mass index (BMI) across adolescence as one possible mechanism linking childhood adversity and adult health. We found associations of childhood adversity with objective indicators of young adult health, including a cardiometabolic risk index, a methylomic aging index, and a count of chronic health conditions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Considerable research has been devoted to understanding the influence of the family on adolescents' risky sexual behavior, with primary focus being given to family structure, family transitions, or parenting. Using longitudinal data from the Family and Community Health Study (n = 550, 54% female, age 10.5 years at Wave 1), an African American sample, the current study goes beyond past research to examine the combined influence of all of these factors while also assessing a wider and more culturally sensitive array of family structures, family transitions, and mediators.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Smoking is one of the leading preventable causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide, prompting interest in its association with DNA methylation-based measures of biological aging. Considerable progress has been made in developing DNA methylation-based measures that correspond to self-reported smoking status. In addition, assessment of DNA methylation-based aging has been expanded to better capture individual differences in risk for morbidity and mortality.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The prospective relations between perceived racial discrimination (PRD), assessed at 4 different time periods from childhood through adolescence, along with assessments of PRD from the police ("hassling"), and self-reports of arrest and incarceration at a mean age of 24.5 years, were examined in a sample of 889 African Americans from the Family and Community Health Study. Multiple covariates were included in the analyses (e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The present study extends prior research on the links between social adversity and aging by employing more comprehensive measures of adversity and a new gene expression index of aging. Hierarchical regression and 20 years of data from a sample of 381 black Americans were used to test models regarding the impact of social adversity on speed of aging. Consistent with the early life sensitivity model, early adversity continued to predict accelerated aging after controlling for adult adversity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: This study examined the role of depressive symptoms in mediating the relationship between early life experiences of racial discrimination and accelerated aging in adulthood for African Americans (i.e., prediction over a 19-year period, from ages 10 to 29) after adjusting for gender and health behaviors.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Notice

Message: fwrite(): Write of 34 bytes failed with errno=28 No space left on device

Filename: drivers/Session_files_driver.php

Line Number: 272

Backtrace:

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: session_write_close(): Failed to write session data using user defined save handler. (session.save_path: /var/lib/php/sessions)

Filename: Unknown

Line Number: 0

Backtrace: