This study investigated how sociopolitical changes in the United States between the 1990s and 2000s may explain the increase in substance use disorders and reduced longevity in more recent cohorts of US midlife adults. The 2008 recession which drastically increased unemployment rates across the country may have had negative implications for downstream contextual and individual processes, including both local crime rates and substance use disorders. The Midlife in the United States Survey cohort (1995; = 6148; 20-75 years) and the MIDUS Refresher cohort (2011; = 3543; 23-76 years) reported on substance use disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Alzheimers Dis
September 2024
Importance: The link between familial loss of a loved one and long-term health decline is complex and not fully understood.
Objective: To test associations of losing a parent, sibling, child, or partner or spouse with accelerated biological aging.
Design, Setting, And Participants: Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a US population-based longitudinal cohort study, were analyzed.
Importance: Epigenetic clocks represent molecular evidence of disease risk and aging processes and have been used to identify how social and lifestyle characteristics are associated with accelerated biological aging. However, most research is based on samples of older adults who already have measurable chronic disease.
Objective: To investigate whether and how sociodemographic and lifestyle characteristics are associated with biological aging in a younger adult sample across a wide array of epigenetic clock measures.
Greater educational attainment is generally associated with healthier and longer lives. However, important heterogeneity in who benefits from educational attainment, how much, and why remains underexplored. In particular, in the United States, the physical health returns to educational attainment are not as large for minoritized racial and ethnic groups compared with individuals racialized as White.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Epigenetic clocks represent molecular evidence of disease risk and aging processes and have been used to identify how social and lifestyle characteristics are associated with accelerated biological aging. However, most of this research is based on older adult samples who already have measurable chronic disease.
Objective: To investigate whether and how sociodemographic and lifestyle characteristics are related to biological aging in a younger adult sample across a wide array of epigenetic clock measures.
Social gradients in health and aging have been reported in studies across many human populations, and - as the papers included in this special collection highlight - also occur across species. This paper serves as a general introduction to the special collection of Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews entitled "Social dimensions of health and aging: population studies, preclinical research, and comparative research using animal models". Authors of the fourteen reviews are primarily members of a National Institute of Aging-supported High Priority Research Network on "Animal Models for the Social Dimensions of Health and Aging".
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomarkers in population health research serve as indicators of incremental physiological deterioration and contribute to our understanding of mechanisms through which social disparities in health unfold over time. Yet, few population-based studies incorporate biomarkers of aging in early midlife, when disease risks may emerge and progress across the life course. We describe the distributions of several biomarkers of inflammation and neurodegeneration and their variation by sociodemographic characteristics using blood samples collected during Wave V of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (ages 33-44 years).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDisparities in socio-economic status (SES) predict many immune system-related diseases, and previous research documents relationships between SES and the immune cell transcriptome. Drawing on a bioinformatically-informed network approach, we situate these findings in a broader molecular framework by examining the upstream regulators of SES-associated transcriptional alterations. Data come from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of 4543 adults in the United States.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Life course epidemiology examines associations between repeated measures of risk and health outcomes across different phases of life. Empirical research, however, is often based on discrete-time models that assume that sporadic measurement occasions fully capture underlying long-term continuous processes of risk.
Methods: We propose (i) the functional relevant life course model (fRLM), which treats repeated, discrete measures of risk as unobserved continuous processes, and (ii) a testing procedure to assign probabilities that the data correspond to conceptual models of life course epidemiology (critical period, sensitive period and accumulation models).
Objective: We examined the acculturation processes involving intergenerational consonance and dissonance in parent-child relationships in U.S. immigrant families.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDisparities in socio-economic status (SES) predict many immune system-related diseases, and previous research documents relationships between SES and the immune cell transcriptome. Drawing on a bioinformatically-informed network approach, we situate these findings in a broader molecular framework by examining the upstream regulators of SES-associated transcriptional alterations. Data come from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of 4,543 adults in the United States.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is a common and severely morbid chronic inflammatory skin disease that is reported to be highly heritable. However, the genetic understanding of HS is insufficient, and limited genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have been performed for HS, which have not identified significant risk loci.
Objective: To identify genetic variants associated with HS and to shed light on the underlying genes and genetic mechanisms.
Diverse manifestations of biological aging often reflect disparities in socioeconomic status (SES). In this paper, we examine associations between indicators of SES and an mRNA-based aging signature during young adulthood, before clinical indications of aging are common. We use data from wave V (2016-2018) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a nationally representative study of adults aged 33-43 years, with transcriptomic data from a subset of 2,491 participants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCognitive aging is a lifelong process with implications for Alzheimer's disease and dementia. This study aims to fill major gaps in research on the natural history of and social disparities in aging-related cognitive decline over the life span. We conducted integrative data analysis of four large U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Air pollution exposure is associated with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Although exposure to air pollution early in life may represent a critical window for development of cardiovascular disease risk factors, few studies have examined associations of long-term air pollution exposure with markers of cardiovascular and metabolic health in young adults.
Objectives: By combining health data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) with air pollution data from the Fused Air Quality Surface using Downscaling (FAQSD) archive, we: (1) calculated multi-year estimates of exposure to ozone (O) and particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter ≤ 2.
Violence victimization has been associated with low-grade inflammation. Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual (LGB) individuals are at greater risk for victimization in childhood and young adulthood compared to heterosexuals. Moreover, the intersection of LGB identity with gender, race/ethnicity, and educational attainment may be differentially associated with victimization rates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite the substantial heritability of antisocial behavior (ASB), specific genetic variants robustly associated with the trait have not been identified. The present study by the Broad Antisocial Behavior Consortium (BroadABC) meta-analyzed data from 28 discovery samples (N = 85,359) and five independent replication samples (N = 8058) with genotypic data and broad measures of ASB. We identified the first significant genetic associations with broad ASB, involving common intronic variants in the forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) gene (lead SNP rs12536335, p = 6.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany common chronic diseases of aging are negatively associated with socioeconomic status (SES). This study examines whether inequalities can already be observed in the molecular underpinnings of such diseases in the 30s, before many of them become prevalent. Data come from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a large, nationally representative sample of US subjects who were followed for over two decades beginning in adolescence.
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