Authored by Micaiah Bilger via The College Fix,
Recent research conducted by neuroscientists at Harvard and Emory universities suggests that the stress caused by racism could potentially shorten the lives of African American women.
Their study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open in June, found a correlation between “higher self-reported racial discrimination” and “DNA methylation age acceleration” among black women.
“Racism steals time from people’s lives – possibly because of the space it occupies in the mind,” lead researchers Negar Fani and Nathaniel Harnett explained in a recent article for The Conversation.
Fani, a professor at Emory, and Harnett, at Harvard, both specialize in psychiatry and neuroscience, and receive funding from the National Institutes of Health.
“Aging is a natural process. However, stress can speed up the biological clock, making people more vulnerable to aging-related diseases, from cardiovascular disease to diabetes and dementia,” they stated.
In their study involving 90 black women in the U.S., they discovered that those who reported more frequent exposure to racism exhibited stronger connections in brain networks associated with rumination and vigilance.
“We found that this, in turn, was connected to accelerated biological aging,”
The researchers noted:
Racial discrimination is a pervasive stressor that is often overlooked. It could manifest as a doctor questioning a Black patient’s pain level and not prescribing pain medication, or a teacher labeling a Black child as a “thug.” It is a constant stressor faced by Black individuals from a young age.
Rumination – the act of reliving and analyzing an event repeatedly – and vigilance, which involves being alert for future threats, are potential coping mechanisms for these stressors. However, rumination and vigilance require energy, and this increased energy expenditure comes at a biological cost.
The study identified changes in two brain regions caused by stress related to racial discrimination.
“These brain changes, in turn, were linked to accelerated cellular aging measured by an epigenetic ‘clock,'” they explained.
According to their findings, higher values on the clock indicate that a person’s biological age exceeds their chronological age. Essentially, the mental space occupied by racist experiences has a toll that can potentially shorten lifespan.
Fani and Harnett expressed their intention to further investigate the relationship between aging and racism, particularly exploring how different forms of racial discrimination and coping strategies impact brain and body responses.
They believe that a deeper understanding of this issue could lead to improved therapeutic and preventive measures, such as programs targeting implicit bias among healthcare providers and educators.
Loading…