Study links racism to chronic inflammation and disease risk among African Americans
A study led by USC Dornsife psychology researcher April Thames may explain how racial discrimination raises the risks of disease among African Americans.
A new study indicates that racism is toxic to humans.
A team of USC and UCLA scientists found that racist experiences appear to increase inflammation in African American individuals, raising their risk of chronic illness, according to the study published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology on April 19.
“We know discrimination is linked to health outcomes, but no one was sure exactly how it harmed health,” said April Thames, associate professor of psychology and psychiatry at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “I looked at it as a chronic stressor. Our results showed that racial discrimination appears to trigger an inflammatory response among African Americans at the cellular level.”
The survival of all living things depends on their ability to respond to infections, stresses and injuries. Such threats trigger an immune system response to fend off pathogens and repair damaged tissues. A select group of genes are key to this defense mechanism, and inflammation is a sign that those genes are working to counter the threat or repair the damage.
Inflammation serves to protect an organism from a health threat. But if someone feels under threat for long periods of time, their health may suffer significantly with chronic inflammation.
“If those genes remain active for an extended period of time, that can promote heart attacks, neurodegenerative diseases, and metastatic cancer,” says co-author Steve Cole of the University of California, Los Angeles.
In previous studies, Cole had found that inflammatory responses are heightened among people in socially-marginalized, isolated groups. “We’ve seen this before in chronic loneliness, poverty, PTSD and other types of adversity,” he says. “But until now, nobody had looked at the effects of discrimination.”
