The study, “Discrimination, Racial Bias, and Telomere Length in African-American Men,” to be published in the February 2014 issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, is the first of its kind to explicitly measure the role that racism-related factors play in the aging process.
It’s in the Blood
Chae and his team gathered 95 black men between the ages of 30 and 50 in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010, and measured black men’s white blood cell telomere lengths. Telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA that sit like the plastic protective caps at the ends of shoelaces. When white blood cells replicate, DNA sequences at the very ends get chewed away, and telomeres are there to be, as Chae explains, “the sacrificial lambs” to protect the more crucial DNA from being damaged. (Telomeres are the glowing white dots at the end of chromosomes, pictured below.)
Telomere length is associated with mortality and age-related diseases like dementia, heart disease and Alzheimer’s—the shorter they are, the higher the risk, which is why they’re seen as a good indicator of physiologic age. Studies have shown that telomeres are also sensitive to psychosocial stress, which can speed up their depletion. “You could have two 35-year-olds who are of course the same age chronologically, but at a cellular level they might be very different depending on what they’ve experienced in life,” says Chae.