This document discusses how social stress from factors like neighborhood conditions, discrimination, and adverse childhood experiences can impact health and aging through biological pathways. Chronic stress gets under the skin by affecting telomere length, inflammation levels, epigenetic aging, and other regulatory systems. Studies show that social stress is associated with shorter telomeres in both human and animal research. Addressing social stress requires efforts at the individual, community, and policy levels to reduce health disparities and promote healthy aging.
7. Psychological
Stress
The Social Stress Exposome
Exercise &
Substance use
Home &
Neighborhood
Many biomarkers are associated with these exposures (causal or not)
Stressful events
trauma
Poor nutrition
& chemical exposures
8. Multi-level Measurement of “stress”
Tier 1: Exposures: SES, Life events, chronic stressors
Chronic contexts – home, neighborhoods, institutions
retrospective or current
Tier 2: Perceived stress/distress (Self report)
Response to stressors, impact and chronicity
Must be tied closely to the event
Tier 3: Biological Regulatory systems
Steady state set points (allostatic states)
Reactivity (homeostatic capacity)
11. Childhood social stress impacts
aging trajectories
• Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) are a strong
predictor of poor mental and adult physical health
CDC ACES reports: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/index.html
NAS report: From Neurons to Neighborhoods, 2000;
NAS report: Preventing mental and behavioral disorders among young people, 2009;
12. Social stress impacts aging biology
(“Hidden Wounds” “Biological Embedding”:
Telomeres, inflammation, epigenetic clock)
Meta-analyses TL: Hanssen et al, 2017, Lie et al, 2017
Review inflam: Danese et al, 2014; Coelho et al, 2014
Meta-analysis clock in adults: Wolf et al, 2018
13. Telomerase is an enzyme
that rebuilds telomeres
Telomeres: ‘non-coding’ base pair sequences capping
chromosome ends, that serve as a “senescence clock”
14. How do our cells age? Some key pathways
• Telomere shortening
• Systemic Inflammation
• Mitochondria impairment
• Accelerated Epigenetic clock
16. • Social status in hyenas
(Lewin et al, 2015)
"
• Social isolation in parrots
(Aydinonat, 2014)
"
• Repeated stress in birds
(Hau, 2015; Nettle, 2015)
Stressed Animals, shorter telomeres
17. Stress and Telomere Length
Stress Exposures:
• Neighborhood disorder
• Caregiving (yrs)
• Violence, IPV (yrs)
• Maternal pregnancy stress
• Early Childhood Adversity
Stress Responses
• Work exhaustion
• Discrimination, implicit bias
• Perceived Stress
• (Hostility, Pessimism)
"
Psychiatric Disorders
Reviews on exposures:
Starkweather et al, 2014
Oliviera et al, 2016
Price et al, 2013
Hanssen et al, 2017
Coimbra et al, 2017
Li et al, 2017
Reviews on PSS:"
Schutte et al, 2014
Mathur et al, 2016
Reviews on PD:
Schutte et al, 2015
Lindqvist et al, 2015
Darrow et al, 2016
Li et al, 2017
Malouff et al, 2017
20. Social stress is complex and must be
tackled at every level—individual,
community, and policy.
21. Sugar is a pathway for health
disparities
• Added sugars predict met. syndrome and diabetes
(eg, Rodriques et al, 2016).
• SSB’s account for 184 000 deaths/year, world wide
(Singh et al, 2015, Circulation)
• High sugar diet in young adulthood reprograms
gene expression and reduces longevity... in flies
(Dobson et al, Cell Reports, 2017).
22. Proof of concept:
Reducing sugar at work?
• SSB sales ban at UCSF
95
95.5
96
96.5
97
97.5
98
98.5
99
Baseline Post-sales ban
waists circumference (cm)