CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Scientists have long known that living in disadvantaged neighborhoods is associated with biological symptoms of accelerated aging, but a recent study found that psychological distress accounts for a significant portion of these effects.

“Consistent with the cascade of risk framework, the theory that cascades of exposures early in life lead to health outcomes later in life, these findings support our hypothesis that long-term exposure to contextual socio-economic disadvantage accelerates biological age and that some, but not all, of this effect operates through increased psychological symptoms,” said the first author. Christina Khamisprofessor of sociology At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The study’s sample population consisted of more than 1,440 people living in Wisconsin and included two factors not examined in previous studies: cumulative exposure to neighborhood disadvantage and overall psychological distress. Co-author Wei Xuprofessor of. Health Anthropology Research Institute in medical college of wisconsinhas led many studies examining the link between health disparities and neighborhood context.

This paper, published in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences, is co-authored by: Michal Engelmanprofessor of sociology, Demographic Center for Health and Aging University of Wisconsin-Madison. and Kristen Maleckiprofessor and director of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health.

Engelmann and Malecki Research on epigenetics, weathering, aging and housing disadvantages Projects that contributed to this work. The project, funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging, connects study participants’ residential histories. Wisconsin Health Survey We will collect survey and biomarker data to investigate the relationship between long-term exposure to residential disadvantage and DNA methylation patterns and metabolic outcomes. Malecki was the lead investigator on SHOW when the data were collected.

While much of the previous research on accelerated aging, neighborhood factors, and resident emotions has focused on depression, this study also investigated stress and anxiety, “and how each psychological factor mediates the relationship between cumulative exposure to neighborhood disadvantage and epigenetic aging,” Xu said. “What we found is that anxiety appears to be a very important mediator between exposure and outcome.”

Khamis said the study used three epigenetic “clocks” that measure an individual’s state of biological aging based on patterns of epigenetic changes in the genome. “These epigenetic clocks have different algorithms and assumptions,” Khamis says. “If you see similar patterns across several different clocks, you have stronger evidence of a relationship.”

The research team used two-second generation clocks called PhenoAge and GrimAge. When regressed on chronological age, these produce residuals indicative of epigenetic age acceleration. Khamis said the Dunedin Aging Pace Clock can be interpreted as the biological rate of aging per year of chronological age.

The research team found that epigenetic age acceleration was common among people in the sample population, but its magnitude varied by clock, Khamis said. By Dunedin PACE, more than 60% of participants had aged faster than expected. However, PhenoAge and GrimAge clocks showed that 46% and 42% of the clocks in the sample were affected, respectively.

Socioeconomic indicators for six census tracts, including median household income, percent of renting households, and percent of residents with a high school education or less, were used to characterize neighborhood disadvantage.

The researchers also created a composite measure of cumulative exposure by tracking each individual’s residential history since age 18. This is a unique exposure level that previous neighborhood biological aging studies have rarely considered due to data limitations, Khamis said.

Xu said the research team obtained up to 50 years of residential data on the participants. “This allowed us to make more precise inferences about the relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and biological aging, and the role of psychological symptoms in that relationship, because we considered their cumulative life course exposures, not just those related to their current neighborhood.”

Individual psychological symptoms were measured using a 21-item scale with three subscales assessing depression, anxiety, and stress separately. Based on clinical measurements, the researchers found that about 24% of study participants had depression scores above normal, while 21% had elevated anxiety levels and 15% had stress scores above normal. By summing each person’s scores on the three subscales, the team calculated a composite measure called “overall distress.”

According to Khamis, cumulative neighborhood disadvantage is a significant predictor of increased overall distress in all three models, and directly and indirectly through increased distress predicts accelerated aging in all three clocks.

“Cumulative neighborhood disadvantage and overall distress were both significant predictors of accelerated aging in all three clocks,” Khamis said. “A one-unit increase in cumulative disadvantage was associated with an additional age acceleration of 0.187 and 0.219 years by the PhenoAge and GrimAge clocks, respectively, and an increase in the pace of aging by 0.006 years by the Dunedin PACE.”

For each acceleration of epigenetic aging, cumulative neighborhood disadvantage had significant direct and indirect effects through overall distress, Khamis said. “About 13% of the effect of neighborhood disadvantage operated through overall distress with the GrimAge clock, compared to about 10% with each of the other two clocks.

“When we looked at the psychological symptom subscales separately, we found that most of the indirect effects on accelerated aging were driven by anxiety,” said Khamis.

amy schultzscientist. University of California Madison School of Medicine and Public Healthand then-postdoctoral fellow Joseph Clark were also co-authors on the study.