Social Influences on Early Adult Stress Biomarkers

我们项目的目标是对社会背景，压力和健康进行人口水平的调查。 我们将压力的多种生物标志物与当前的理论和来自社会和经济领域的测量工具相结合， 行为科学，以更好地了解社会环境如何“深入皮肤”影响压力 和健康。我们使用的数据来自全国青少年纵向研究的四个阶段。 健康（添加健康）追求三个目标：1）检查多个主观之间的相互关系 和生理措施的压力; 2）调查如何措施的社会经济地位，邻里 儿童/青少年时期以及向成年过渡期间的素质和人际关系 影响成年早期的压力;和3）测试竞争的理论模型的联合影响的社会- 经济状况、邻里质量、人际关系对压力的影响。我们检查主观的 压力测量，包括感知压力，抑郁症状和焦虑症状，以及 作为内分泌、心血管、代谢、免疫和炎症活动的生理测量。我们 利用Add Health数据集的广度和深度， 社会压力如何影响身心健康的最新调查。此外，大样本 Add Health的规模和种族，民族和经济多样性使我们能够调查 压力导致健康差距。压力是发病率和死亡率的主要因素， 社会环境影响人类健康的生理机制可以帮助研究人员， 临床医生和政策制定者：a）确定不利的心理社会环境; B）更好地了解 疾病前和疾病途径;以及c）为干预措施提供信息，以减少对压力源的暴露， 压力对生理的不利影响，并防止压力相关疾病的出现。

The goal of our project is to conduct a population-level investigation of social contexts, stress, and health. We integrate multiple biomarkers of stress with current theory and measurement tools from the social and behavioral sciences to gain a better understanding of how social contexts "get under the skin" to affect stress and health in young adults. We use data from four waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) in pursuit of three objectives: 1) Examine the interrelations among multiple subjective and physiological measures of stress; 2) Investigate how measures of socio-economic status, neighborhood quality, and interpersonal relationships in childhood/adolescence and over the transition to adulthood influence stress in early adulthood; and 3) Test competing theoretical models of the joint influence of socio- economic status, neighborhood quality, and interpersonal relationships on stress. We examine subjective measures of stress, including perceived stress, symptoms of depression, and symptoms of anxiety, as well as physiological measures of endocrine, cardiovascular, metabolic, immune, and inflammatory activity. We take advantage of the breadth and depth of the Add Health dataset to conduct the most comprehensive investigation to date of how social stress affects physical and mental health. Additionally, the large sample size and racial, ethnic, and economic diversity of Add Health allow us to investigate the extent to which stress leads to health disparities. Stress is a major contributor to morbidity and mortality, and investigating the physiological mechanisms through which social contexts affect human health can help investigators, clinicians, and policy makers to: a) identify adverse psychosocial environments; b) better understand predisease and disease pathways; and c) inform interventions to reduce exposure to stressors, reduce the adverse impact of stressors on physiology, and prevent the emergence of stress-related disorders.