The MIDUS (Midlife in the U.S.) national longitudinal study included, at its second wave, a sample of African American adults from Milwaukee, WI, a high segregated U.S. city, to increase participation of minority respondents in clinic-based biological assessments. Numerous advances have been generated on the impact of psychosocial stress, including perceived discrimination, on health, well-being, and physiological risk factors. This revised application requests funds to conduct a longitudinal follow-up 9-10 years later on the Milwaukee sample to parallel longitudinal work currently underway on the main MIDUS sample. We hypothesize that Milwaukee African Americans compared to their White counterparts in MIDUS will show earlier age-related decline in health (chronic conditions, health symptoms, biological risk factors), health behaviors (physical activity, diet, smoking, alcohol use) and cognitive capacities. Further we predict that race differences in longitudinal aging will be accounted for by differential environmental exposures (work/family stress, perceived discrimination) as well as more adverse experiences related to the economic recession. Exploiting the rich psychosocial assessments in MIDUS, we will investigate factors that moderate the impact of stress exposures on health. Such analyses will include vulnerability factors such as psychological distress (depression, anxiety, anger) hypothesized to exacerbate the adverse impact of environmental stress on health as well as resilience factors such as psychosocial strengths (purpose in life, sense of control, optimism, social ties) hypothesized to mitigate against such pernicious effects. The revised proposed distills the innovative features of the proposed research and offers novel analytic strategies to test key hypotheses.
Growing evidence suggests that age-related changes in health differ notably by such factors as income, educational status and race. This research will examine stress exposures in African Americans in the most segregated city in the U.S.: Milwaukee, WI, and compare them to Whites of similar economic and educational backgrounds. A key focus is on identifying factors that mitigate against poor health profiles in such contexts o adversity, so as to advance knowledge of protective resources that need to be more widely nurtured and promoted.
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