Thread by @NonHumanMedia1

Epigenetics and the Embodiment of Race: Developmental Origins of US Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Health 🧵1/13
researchgate.net/publication/52…

"It is now broadly known that an African American man in Harlem is less likely than a man in Bangladesh to survive to the age of 65."

"..cardiovascular diseases (CVD's) and their precursor conditions...hypertenstion, diabetes, and obesity, contribute heavily to this disparity."

"Hypertension rates are roughly 1.5-2 times higher in African Americans compared to whites and are especially high in certain regions, such as the so-called stroke belt of the American South."

"..nearly half of all African Americans adults develop some form of CVD"

"African Americans not only have higher rates of CVD as adults, but they also have a higher burden of the antecedent condition of lower birth rate...Thus, there is a strong rationale to consider a developmental and transgenerational dimension to these racial disparities"

"How the DNA is packaged within the chromatin influences how easy or difficult a gene is to access and thus, whether and how much it may be expressed in that cell. Epigenetic markings have thus been likened to the volume control for genes.."

"Current research is showing how environmental factors can modify genetic processes, thereby affecting epigenetic marks and downstream patterns of gene expression in specific cells and cell lineages."

"In Holocaust survivors, severity of [PTSD] symptoms—which influences maternal cortisol production during pregnancy—predicts levels of cortisol excretion in postnatal offspring"

"The emerging understanding of the epigenetic mechanisms that build the phenotype represents a revolution in biology that is gathering momentum."

"It is well established that African Americans have lower average birth weights than US whites"

"The racial disparity in birth outcomes has been documented for several decades and has shown no signs of significant improvement in that time"

"In one study of 2.5 million deliveries, foreign-born women of African ancestry were 25% less likely to give birth to a LBW baby compared to their US-born counterparts, while there was no difference in birth outcomes by natality by whites."

"Among subsequent generations born in the US, the birth weight distribution of the offspring of African immigrants shifted to lower values."

"ethnographic approaches to social and cultural contexts of stress are providing improved insights into the causes and impacts of stress in different communities and demographic subgroups, and will have much to add to future work"

"Not only are traditional racial categories poor predictors of gene frequencies, a fact that has been appreciated for decades, but developmental and epigenetic processes help to clarify why genes do not determine biological fates in simple fashion."
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