Dataset Information

History of socioeconomic disadvantage and allostatic load in later life.

ABSTRACT: There is a growing interest in understanding how the experience of socioeconomic status (SES) adversity across the life course may accumulate to negatively affect the functioning of biological regulatory systems important to functioning and health in later adulthood. The goal of the present analyses was to examine whether greater life course SES adversity experience would be associated with higher scores on a multi-system allostatic load (AL) index of physiological function in adulthood. Data for these analyses are from 1008 participants (92.2% White) from the Biomarker Substudy of the Study of Midlife in the US (MIDUS). Multiple indicators of SES adversity in childhood (parent educational attainment, welfare status, financial situation) and two points in adulthood (educational attainment, household income, difficulty paying bills, availability of money to meet basic needs, current financial situation) were used to construct SES adversity measures for each life course phase. An AL score was constructed using information on 24 biomarkers from 7 different physiological systems (sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, cardiovascular, lipid metabolism, glucose metabolism, inflammatory immune activity). Analyses indicate higher AL as a function of greater SES adversity at each phase of, and cumulatively across, the life course. Associations were only moderately attenuated when accounting for a wide array of health status, behavioral and psychosocial factors. Findings suggest that SES adversity experience may cumulate across the life course to have a negative impact on multiple biological systems in adulthood. An important aim of future research is the replication of current findings in this predominantly White sample in more ethnically diverse populations.

SUBMITTER: Gruenewald TL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3264490 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

History of socioeconomic disadvantage and allostatic load in later life.

Gruenewald Tara L TL Karlamangla Arun S AS Hu Perry P Stein-Merkin Sharon S Crandall Carolyn C Koretz Brandon B Seeman Teresa E TE

Social science & medicine (1982) 20111110 1

There is a growing interest in understanding how the experience of socioeconomic status (SES) adversity across the life course may accumulate to negatively affect the functioning of biological regulatory systems important to functioning and health in later adulthood. The goal of the present analyses was to examine whether greater life course SES adversity experience would be associated with higher scores on a multi-system allostatic load (AL) index of physiological function in adulthood. Data fo ...[more]

PMID: 22115943

Similar Datasets

Project description:Background and objectivesLow socioeconomic status confers unfavorable health, but the degree and mechanisms by which life course socioeconomic status affects kidney health is unclear.Design, setting, participants, & measurementsWe examined the association between cumulative lifetime socioeconomic status and CKD in black Americans in the Jackson Heart Study. We used conditional process analysis to evaluate allostatic load as a potential mediator of this relation. Cumulative lifetime socioeconomic status was an age-standardized z-score, which has 1-SD units by definition, and derived from self-reported childhood socioeconomic status, education, and income at baseline. Allostatic load encompassed 11 baseline biomarkers subsuming neuroendocrine, metabolic, autonomic, and immune physiologic systems. CKD outcomes included prevalent CKD at baseline and eGFR decline and incident CKD over follow-up.ResultsAmong 3421 participants at baseline (mean age 55 years [SD 13]; 63% female), cumulative lifetime socioeconomic status ranged from -3.3 to 2.3, and 673 (20%) had prevalent CKD. After multivariable adjustment, lower cumulative lifetime socioeconomic status was associated with greater prevalence of CKD both directly (odds ratio [OR], 1.18; 95% confidence interval [95% CI], 1.04 to 1.33 per 1 SD and OR, 1.45; 95% CI, 1.15 to 1.83 in lowest versus highest tertile) and via higher allostatic load (OR, 1.09; 95% CI, 1.06 to 1.12 per 1 SD and OR, 1.17; 95% CI, 1.11 to 1.24 in lowest versus highest tertile). After a median follow-up of 8 years (interquartile range, 7-8 years), mean annual eGFR decline was 1 ml/min per 1.73 m2 (SD 2), and 254 out of 2043 (12%) participants developed incident CKD. Lower cumulative lifetime socioeconomic status was only indirectly associated with greater CKD incidence (OR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.01 to 1.07 per 1 SD and OR, 1.08; 95% CI, 1.02 to 1.14 in lowest versus highest tertile) and modestly faster annual eGFR decline, in milliliters per minute (OR, 0.01; 95% CI, 0.00 to 0.02 per 1 SD and OR, 0.02; 95% CI, 0.00 to 0.04 in lowest versus highest tertile), via higher baseline allostatic load.ConclusionsLower cumulative lifetime socioeconomic status was substantially associated with CKD prevalence but modestly with CKD incidence and eGFR decline via baseline allostatic load.

Project description:Since its conceptualization, there has been a lack of consensus on the best way to operationalize allostatic load (AL). As a marker of the cumulative, physiological wear and tear on the body resulting from chronic exposure to stressors, it follows that AL should be higher among people who have faced more stressful life experiences. Thus, the purpose of this study was to construct AL scores using different operationalizations and, as a measure of construct validity, compare whether each construction produced expected disparities in AL by race and a composite socioeconomic status (SES) variable which accounts for measures over the life course; we also explored differences by sex. We conducted the study in a sample of 45-52-year-old offspring from the Child Health and Development Studies, a longitudinal birth cohort established in the early 1960s. AL scores were constructed in 6 different ways and included 10 biomarkers from inflammatory, neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, and metabolic systems. Our main approach to constructing AL was to sum across high-risk biomarker quartiles, correct for medication use, and use sex-specific high-risk quartiles for specific biomarkers. Alternative constructions did not use sex-specific quartiles and/or weighted biomarkers within subsystems and/or did not correct for medication use. We estimated differences in AL scores by race, SES, sex and their pairwise interactions. All constructions of AL, including the main approach, produced expected disparities by race (higher scores for Black vs. non-Black participants) and life course SES (higher scores for low vs. high SES participants). However, disparities by sex only emerged when the AL score was constructed via approaches that did not use sex-specific high-risk quartiles; for these alternative constructions, overall, female participants had higher AL scores than male participants and Black female participants had the highest AL scores in the sample. For most constructions, the pairwise interaction between sex and SES, showed a stronger disparity in AL scores between low and high-SES female compared with low- and high-SES male participants; this suggests that, in terms of lowering AL, high life course SES may be more important for female than male participants. In conclusion, our results suggest that the basic AL concept is consistently expressed in different operationalizations, making it an especially useful and robust tool for understanding disparities by race and SES.

Dataset Information

History of socioeconomic disadvantage and allostatic load in later life.

Publications

History of socioeconomic disadvantage and allostatic load in later life.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets