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层面的调查。 我们将压力的多个生物标记物与当前的理论和测量工具相结合，这些工具来自社会和 行为科学，以更好地理解社会环境是如何“深入”影响压力的 以及年轻人的健康。我们使用了全国青少年纵向研究的四次浪潮的数据 健康(Add Health)追求三个目标：1)考察多个主观之间的相互关系 和生理压力测量；2)调查如何测量社会经济地位、邻里 儿童/青春期和成年后的质量和人际关系 影响成年早期的压力；以及3)检验相互竞争的理论模型，即社会和文化因素的联合影响 经济状况、邻里关系质量和人际关系压力。我们检查主观的 测量压力，包括感知到的压力、抑郁症状和焦虑症状 作为内分泌、心血管、代谢、免疫和炎症活动的生理指标。我们 利用Add Health数据集的广度和深度进行最全面的 迄今为止，关于社会压力如何影响身心健康的调查。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 压力会导致健康差距。压力是发病率和死亡率的主要贡献者，调查 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)识别不利的心理社会环境；b)更好地了解 疾病前期和疾病途径；以及c)告知干预措施，以减少暴露于应激源，减少 应激源对生理的不利影响，防止应激相关障碍的出现。

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.