Elsevier

Psychoneuroendocrinology

Volume 80, June 2017, Pages 36-38
Psychoneuroendocrinology

Short Communication
Brief report: Neighborhood disadvantage and hair cortisol among older urban African Americans

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2017.02.026Get rights and content

Highlights

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    Among 49 older African American adults, objective neighborhood adversity was associated with higher levels of hair cortisol.

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    Subjective perception of neighborhood adversity mediated the link between objective neighborhood adversity and hair cortisol.

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    Results were significant after controlling for demographics covariates, including participants socioeconomic status.

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that living in poor neighborhoods is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. However, researchers are now investigating the biological pathways responsible for the deleterious effects of neighborhood disadvantage on health. This study investigated whether neighborhood disadvantage (i.e., a measure of relative neighborhood quality derived by combining social and built environmental conditions) was associated with hair cortisol—a retrospective indicator of long-term hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis activation—and whether this link would be mediated by self-reported neighborhood satisfaction. Forty-nine older African Americans were recruited from thirty-nine Detroit census tracts across five strata of census tract adversity. Participants were interviewed face-to-face to collect psychosocial measures. Each provided a hair sample for analysis of cortisol. Multiple regression analyses revealed that higher neighborhood disadvantage was associated with higher levels of hair cortisol levels and that neighborhood satisfaction partially explained this association. These results are the first to our knowledge to demonstrate a direct link between neighborhood disadvantage and hair cortisol in a sample of older adults and to show that self-reported neighborhood satisfaction may be a psychological intermediary of this association.

Section snippets

Participants

From a larger sample of 100 people enrolled from 74 census tracts, a subset of 49 people from 39 census tracts consented to provide a hair sample for cortisol analysis. Participants were recruited from a volunteer registry of approximately 1400 African-Americans age 55 and older willing to participate in research of interest to them. From the registry, we drew a stratified random sample based on a census tract index of neighborhood quality. The response rate for our random sample was 21%,

Results

Descriptive statistics are reported in Table 1. Hair cortisol was positively associated with SES (r = 0.343, p = 0.016), neighborhood disadvantage (r = 0.336, p = 0.018), and neighborhood satisfaction (r = 0.406, p = 0.004). Neighborhood disadvantage and neighborhood satisfaction were also positively correlated (r = 0.338, p = 0.018).

Regression analyses controlling for covariates revealed a significant effect of neighborhood disadvantage on neighborhood satisfaction [b = 0.351, 95% CI: 0.0589: 0.6440, p = 0.020].

Discussion

In a sample of older African Americans, we found that higher neighborhood disadvantage predicted higher levels of hair cortisol, and self-reported neighborhood satisfaction partially explained this association. These results did not change when analyses were run controlling for covariates, which included participants’ age, gender, living status, and SES.

Previous work showed that low neighborhood SES and poor environmental physical conditions disrupt the circadian rhythm of cortisol secretion (

Role of funding sources

Funded by the WSU Center for Urban Responses to Environmental Stressors (with funds from the WSU Office of VP for Research & National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Grant P30 ES020957).

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