Early origins of health disparities: Chronic inflammation

The United States is characterized by persistent and growing socioeconomic and race-based disparities in a wide range of health outcomes, including chronic inflammation. Measuring inflammation in early adulthood is important because it predicts risk for major public health burdens, including cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, disability, and adverse birth outcomes. As such, there is an urgent need to understand the pathways through which social and economic environments contribute to chronic inflammation, and recent research provides compelling evidence that infancy and childhood are sensitive time periods during which exposure to socioeconomic disadvantage can have lasting effects on health, including the regulation of inflammation. The proposed research applies a biosocial life course approach to investigate the early-life origins of disparities in chronic inflammation, with the following specific aims: 1) Document socioeconomic disparities in chronic inflammation, and investigate body fat, health behaviors, and psychosocial stress as pathways mediating associations between socioeconomic status and inflammation; 2) Investigate early-life socioeconomic status—and correlated exposures—as predictors of chronic inflammation in young adulthood; and 3) Evaluate chronic inflammation as a risk factor for adverse birth outcomes, including pregnancy complications, pre-term delivery, and lower birth weight. These aims will be implemented using existing data from five waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a large, nationally-representative cohort with rich contextual and behavioral data, as well as physiological and health data, collected at multiple time points over the life course. C-reactive protein (CRP)—a key biomarker of inflammation—will be the primary dependent variable in a series of structural equation models (SEM) that test the hypothesis that lower socioeconomic status contributes to higher inflammati