By Julianne Hing
Colorlines
Racism is a powerful enough force that it can wear down a man’s body. Those are the findings, at once common-sense and groundbreaking, in a study led by University of Maryland epidemiologist David Chae which examines the relationship between white blood cell telomere lengths and experiences with racism.
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.
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.
People start out with roughly 8,000 base pairs and they wear down at a rate of 50 to 100 every year. Among black men who had internalized strong anti-black biases, those who experienced high levels of racial discrimination had on average 140 fewer base pairs of telomeres than those who reported low levels of racial discrimination. The combination of high levels of external racial discrimination and internalized anti-black attitudes was a toxic mix.
Researchers found, on the other hand, that there was a slight positive relationship between experiences of discrimination and telomere length in black men who had strong pro-black biases. That is, a positive racial identity could act as a kind of psychological buffer against the ravages of racism.
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