Studies across a range of organisms establish that significant increases in longevity are often accompanied by delayed morbidity; thus research to evaluate risk factors and mechanisms underlying longevity may yield new insights for interventions to improve the public?s health with aging. In particular, African Americans experience higher mortality, and greater morbidity for many chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, the most common cause of death in the U.S. Identifying new factors linked to longevity in Blacks could therefore be especially meaningful. This competing revision supplement to ?Optimism and Exceptional Longevity? (R01 AG53273), is designed to enhance our research on optimism, longevity, and underlying mechanisms, by extending work on predominantly Caucasian men and women in the Nurses? Health Study and Normative Aging Study to African Americans. Growing evidence consistently links positive psychological attributes such as optimism to favorable health outcomes, suggesting they may be powerful health assets. In our current R01 we have already found strong relations of higher optimism to lower mortality, after control for confounders including depression. Preliminary data indicate similar associations of optimism to health for White and for Black women in the Nurses? Health Study; but, the small sample of Blacks precludes substantive research and motivates the current application. Specifically, consistent with our parent R01, we propose to conduct novel, important investigations of optimism and longevity focusing on African Americans. We will leverage existing data from the Jackson Heart Study of 5000 Black men and women, and the Women?s Health Initiative of 14,000 Black (and 135,000 White) women.
In Aim 1, we will examine if optimism is related to increased likelihood of healthy behaviors (e.g., physical activity) and longevity in Blacks, as well as test health behaviors as mediators of the optimism-longevity relation.
In Aim 2, we will investigate the association of optimism with slower biologic aging (e.g., leukocyte telomere length and epigenetic age, a validated score based on DNA methylation) in Blacks. We also include an exploratory Aim 3 to expand research on optimism by combining insights from natural language processing, machine learning and psychology to develop an unobtrusive measure of optimism, utilizing Facebook posts. We will develop an algorithm to measure optimism with social media data and compare it to traditional optimism scales, consider possible biases in using social media for health-related research, and begin to test the optimism algorithm against individual health outcomes. In summary, the proposed research will provide an in-depth assessment of optimism, longevity, and an array of behavioral and biological factors in African Americans, that are important in their own right and relevant to many health endpoints ? suggesting novel ways to improve health. We will also begin to expand tools for measuring optimism with the goal of enabling substantial new research opportunities for studying health assets.
Building on prior work suggesting that optimism leads to more favorable health outcomes, we propose to examine the relationship of optimism to greater longevity and to evaluate biological and behavioral mechanisms that can explain the health enhancing effects of optimism, focusing on populations including large numbers of African Americans in whom there has been limited research. In addition, we will explore development of novel, unobtrusive measures of optimism derived from social media for use in population- based research. Our proposed work has the potential to advance understanding of novel ways to increase longevity in African Americans who have higher mortality than Caucasians, and also to advance the study of health assets and health by exploring new methods of assessing optimism, a potentially potent health asset.
