Self-reported experiences of everyday discrimination are associated with elevated C-reactive protein levels in older African-American adults
Section snippets
Background
Self-reported experiences of “everyday” discrimination (i.e. fairly minor, day-to-day forms of interpersonal mistreatment) have been linked to a variety of different cardiovascular health outcomes, including elevated blood pressure (Guyll et al., 2001, Lewis et al., 2009, Roberts et al., 2008), early signs of atherosclerosis (Lewis et al., 2006, Troxel et al., 2003), and all-cause mortality (Barnes et al., 2008). In contrast to acute, one-time instances of discrimination, “everyday” experiences
Participants
Participants were 296 older African-American adults from the Minority Aging Research Study (MARS), an ongoing, longitudinal epidemiologic cohort study of risk factors for cognitive decline in community-dwelling older African-Americans (Arvanitakis et al., 2009). MARS participants were recruited between August 2004 and April 2008 from churches, senior buildings and African-American social organizations in the greater Chicago, Illinois area. Eligible participants were individuals aged 65 and
Results
Sample characteristics are presented in Table 2. Participants were 73 years of age (SD = 6.3) on average, with approximately 14.5 years of education (SD = 3.6). The sample was predominantly female (71%). Twenty-six percent of participants in the sample were normal weight, 30% were overweight and 43.3% were obese. The average BMI was in the overweight range, at 29.4 (SD = 5.9). Participants were fairly healthy; the number of prior vascular diseases ranged from 0 to 3 with a mean of less than one, and
Discussion
The current study examined the cross-sectional association between self-reported experiences of everyday discrimination and CRP in a sample of older African-American adults. Consistent with prior studies of CRP in older adults, we observed considerable variability in CRP levels (Macy et al., 1997, Ockene et al., 2001) that was apparent across the range of discrimination scores in our cohort. Nonetheless, our findings revealed a significant, dose–response association between everyday
Acknowledgments
The Minority Aging Study (MARS) has grant support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute on Aging (NIA), R01 AG22018 and Investigator Initiated Research Grant 07-59818 from the Alzheimer’s Association. Dr. Lewis was supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Grant K01HL 092591. The content of this manuscript is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIA, NHLBI, the NIH or the Alzheimer’s
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