Biological Age vs. Chronological Age

RACIAL DISPARITIES IN BIOLOGICAL vs. CHRONOLOGICAL AGE
New Study Cites Implications for Patients, Providers, and Policymakers

Because of the damaging socioeconomic and psychosocial stressors they experience as a routine matter of daily life, the health and biomechanical systems of African American bodies "weather" or deteriorate faster than those of white people. A new study of the molecular and physiological data from 20,000 older Americans finds that the bodies of Black people are, on average, biologically nine years older than the bodies of white people of the same chronological age.
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Entitled "Patterns and Life Course Determinants of Black-White Disparities in Biological Age Acceleration: A Decomposition Analysis" and published in the Journal Demography, the study was among the first to directly link multiple biomarkers to specific social determinants of health to quantify their contribution to Black/White disparities in accelerated aging.

Essentially, the study documented the way that the social determinants of health directly affect the function and viability of certain human body organs and systems in ways that cause Black people's bodies to deteriorate faster than white people's bodies, thus fostering higher risks and vulnerabilities for premature illness and death.

Headed by LDI Senior Fellow Courtney Boen, PhD, MPH, a faculty member at Penn's School of Arts and Sciences, the team of researchers from five universities writes:

"Black health patterns are 'first and worst': Black people experience earlier onset of health decline, greater severity of disease, and poorer survival rates than Whites. Racism patterns exposure to many damaging social exposures linked to accelerated aging... Relative to White people, Black people in the United States live shorter, sicker lives."

Using three blood chemistry-based measures of biological aging the researchers quantified the progress of age-related deterioration across multiple bodily systems and examined how chronic exposures to socioeconomic and psychosocial stress contributed to different racial patterns of biological aging and age-related biophysical deterioration for Blacks and whites.

"Racism contributes to population health inequality partly by differentially exposing those racialized as White and those racialized as Black to disparate material, psychosocial, and environmental opportunities and risks across the life span generating divergent age patterns of physiological dysregulation and biological aging and contributing to the racial patterning of morbidity and mortality risk."

"Dysregulation" describes disruptions to a body's ability to balance and maintain a stable internal environment that is crucial for optimal organ and cellular functioning and survival. When vital systems become dysregulated, they lose their ability to control and self-regulate themselves, causing or worsening various morbid conditions.

READ THE STUDY: https://read.dukeupress.edu/demograph...