Week 2: “Epigenetics and the Embodiment of Race”

In the article “Epigenetics and the Embodiment of Race: Developmental Origins of US Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Health,” Christopher Kuzawa and Elizabeth Sweet discuss how social factors such as economic status, psychosocial stress, and institutional discrimination impose barriers that increase racial disparities in cardiovascular disease risk. Although the authors acknowledge race as a socially constructed term of categorization which carries biological implications, it is used to describe the increased risk of African Americans over Caucasians to have cardiovascular diseases such diabetes and hypertension. The authors explain this racial disparity in terms of different environmental stresses the two groups face. African American women are more likely to have babies with lower birth rates than Caucasians, which can be used as an early indicator of hypertension and later cardiovascular problems. Part of the reason for these lower birth rates include maternal psychosocial stress, anxiety, depression, discrimination, inequality, and residential segregation, all of which are more prevalent in African American females. Thus epigenetic maternal factors influence prenatal health which predisposes the baby to be more at risk for cardiovascular diseases. These social factors are encompassed in epigenetics which result from external rather than genetic influences. Epigenetics can also be used to look at health disparities between refugee groups whose ancestors were victims of genocide and other populations whose ancestors were not forced into such tragic and stressful circumstances.

AMSA  (American Medical Student Association) takes a further look into how refugees face higher barriers to quality health care access. Many refugees, displaced from their home country, face cultural and linguistic barriers that prevent them from receiving health care benefits that other citizens are entitled to. These refugees are often integrated as a minority group and thus face psychosocial stresses of social exclusion, very similar to the conditions of African Americans in the United States.

http://www.amsa.org/AMSA/Libraries/Initiative_Docs/2011_Social_Exclusion_and_Discrimination.sflb.ashx