Life-Course Adversity and Other Determinants of Stress Regulation & Epigenetic Aging in Midlife Adults

Life-course adversity impacts health and life expectancy, especially for underresourced communities. The proposed mixed-methods research will collect new data to complement a wealth of existing longitudinal data previously collected at key developmental stages over more than three decades from two geographically and socioeconomically heterogeneous cohorts, the Harlem Longitudinal Development Study and the Children in the Community Study. The sample will consist of 450 midlife adults previously surveyed in childhood/early adolescence, emerging adulthood, young adulthood, and midlife. The proposed research, informed by the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory, will quantify and contextualize the associations of exposure to adversity, namely, individual-level experiences of adversity within and across institutions and social contexts over the life course (e.g., socioeconomic challenges) and neighborhood-level socioeconomic disadvantage with stress regulation, epigenetic modifications (i.e., epigenetic age), and mental health (i.e., psychological distress, depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress). This will be accomplished using four forms of data that will be triangulated to optimize results and interpretation: survey, biological, qualitative, and U.S. Census data. The quantitative survey and biological data will facilitate comprehensive analysis of geographic differences in adversity and their associations with stress regulation, epigenetic aging, and mental health. These analyses will be further contextualized through in-depth interviews with a purposive sample selected from the study cohort. The qualitative data will innovatively provide deeper understanding and interpretation of adversity over the life course, including exclusion from opportunities, stress, resilience, and other salient experiences that are often missed by quantitative data, including intergenerational transmission of both disadvantage and resilience. Further, this research will identify protective factors that can mitigate the deleterious sequelae of adversity and thus highlight areas of resilience that can be leveraged in interventions. In conclusion, identifying how social conditions that manifest at the individual and neighborhood levels create life-course adversity and examining their association with biological stress regulation, epigenetic aging, and mental health constitutes a crucial step towards creating policies and programs that facilitate the attainment of the highest level of health for all people, an explicit goal of the Healthy People initiative.