I have been talking with a publisher and a literary agent about a book I am writing, Alzheimer's Disease: The Brand (based on many of the stories shared here) and more than once I doubted my sanity. I am told books that really sell have better titles like, How to Cure Your Child of Autism and Beating Bipolar Disease. What our society needs is certainly not less scientific credibility. The 24-hour news cycle and abundance of digital platforms have certainly increased the distortion and noise to filter. I am reminded of the carnival trade where everyone's a winner and step right up, be the first to burst the balloon in the clown's mouth. Sometimes you have to make the hard decisions not the most lucrative. Otherwise you are at risk of accumulating a lot of useless "prizes" that can't possibly bring value to anyone--especially your clients.
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After a week of reading spurious headlines it is nice to sit down with a nice cup of science. I hope you will take the time to listen to this short clip of an important Nobel prize winner.
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Elizabeth Blackburn is a molecular biologist contributing to our advanced understanding of telomeres--the ends of chromosomes. The ability to slow down the aging process or fight chronic deceases is hidden inside these tiny structures. Her specific research was the co-discovery of the enzyme responsible for rebuilding the telomeres after cell division, telomerase. There have been interesting studies that have focused on telomeres here, here, and here.
The ground breaking findings implicate telomere length as if not causative at least associated with morbidity and mortality. Health policy directed at improving social determinants of health will likely be of more value in prevention of chronic diseases like Alzheimer's Disease than the current trajectory of looking for the needle in the haystack panacea. Hopefully cooler "scientific-minded" heads will prevail allowing recognition and identification of diffuse clinical pathways triggered by lifelong health consequences. |
Race-Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors, and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-based Sample
The Healthy Environments Partnership (HEP) analyzed a community survey evaluating social and physical determinants of Detroit neighborhoods. The findings are compelling and seem to establish a worthwhile research effort. If social determinants are indeed correlated with telomere length perhaps we are looking at the wrong mechanism for diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease. Evidence increasingly points to telomere length being highly predictive of healthy life expectancy
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Residents of distressed urban areas suffer early aging-related disease and excess mortality. using a community-based participatory research approach in a collaboration between social researchers and cellular biologists, we collected a unique data set of 239 black, white, or Mexican adults from a stratified, multistage probability sample of three Detroit neighborhoods. We drew venous blood and measured telomere length (TL), an indicator of stress-mediated biological aging, linking respondents’ TL to their community survey responses. We regressed TL on socioeconomic, psychosocial, neighborhood, and behavioral stressors, hypothesizing and finding an interaction between poverty and racial-ethnic group. Poor whites had shorter TL than nonpoor whites; poor and nonpoor blacks had equivalent TL; and poor Mexicans had longer TL than nonpoor Mexicans. Findings suggest unobserved heterogeneity bias is an important threat to the validity of estimates of TL differences by race-ethnicity. They point to health impacts of social identity as contingent, the products of structurally rooted biopsychosocial processes. |
Thoughtful discussions about content development and outcomes analytics that apply the principles and frameworks of health policy and economics to persistent and perplexing health and health care problems--
bonny@graphemeconsulting.info
freelance content media and analytics
bonny@graphemeconsulting.info
freelance content media and analytics
