'Weathering': What are the health ramifications of stress and discrimination?
Repeated contact with socioeconomic adversity, politics marginalization, racism, and perpetual discrimination could harm health. With this Special Feature, we explore this hazardous effect, which is recognized as weathering.
If there is a very important factor that the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Dark Lives Matter protests this past year have made abundantly clear, it is this: Racism kills.
But racism and racial discrimination do not simply jeopardize people’s lives directly, through violent functions and hate crimes perpetrated by those who carry racist beliefs.
Discrimination and marginalization can also slowly chip away at one’s health, leading to those who find themselves at the obtaining end of discriminatory behaviour to years or even die prematurely.
In health, this effect of premature natural aging and associated health threats therefore to be repeatedly subjected to public adversity and marginalization bears the name of weathering.
With this feature, we explore the meaning and effects of this term by looking at the studies that solidified and broadened its acceptance in the scientific community.
The way the weathering notion came about
The term “weathering” was coined in 1992 by Dr. Arline Geronimus, at that time a researcher in the Office of General public Health Plan and Administration at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Presently, Dr. Geronimus is a professor in medical Behavior and Health Education division of the same university.
While studying trends in women’s fertility, Dr. Geronimus possessed observed that DARK-COLORED women don't have the same “leading” childbearing years as their white counterparts.
Namely, an average white woman is considered to really have the most fertility and the lowest threat of unhealthy pregnancy and neonatal mortality when she is between 20 and early 30 years old, notes Dr. Geronimus in her paper.
However, for DARK-COLORED women, this peak of fertility and point of smallest risk is at their teens. Quite simply, Black women in america were much more likely to truly have a healthy pregnancy in their later teens than in their mid-twenties.
Dr. Geronimus then first advanced the “weathering hypothesis” as a potential explanation for these maternal and infant health disparities.
In her groundbreaking paper, she defines the weathering hypothesis as the idea “that the fitness of African American women may begin to deteriorate in early adulthood as a physical consequence of cumulative socioeconomic disadvantage.”
An apt and troubling metaphor
As Dr. Geronimus said in an interview for NPR, the idea of weathering had not been exactly received with much enthusiasm at that time. It does, however, grab significant traction over the following decades.
For instance, Google Scholar reveals over 1,000 citations of the 1992 paper, and a growing tendency in how often Dr. Geronimus’s work generally speaking has been cited over time, with the sharpest surge in 2020.
In her later work, Dr. Geronimus and other scientists who embraced the weathering hypothesis long it to apply to Black adults generally, not just Dark women.
For example, a 2006 paper by Dr. Geronimus and colleagues set out to test the hypothesis that Dark adults “experience early on health deterioration because of the cumulative impact of repeated experience with public or monetary adversity and politics marginalization.”
Inside the NPR interview, Dr. Geronimus described the notion of weathering utilizing a metaphor that is at equal strategy disheartening, troubling, and alarmingly true.
Discussing the activist Erica Garner, who died of issues from a heart attack at the age of 27, Dr. Geronimus said that the thoughts of stress leading to such an early on death are like playing a casino game of Jenga.
Paraphrasing the activist’s sister, she said: “They grab one piece at the same time, at the same time, and another part and another bit, until you sort of collapse. […] I thought that Jenga metaphor was very apt because you begin losing bits of your health and well-being, nevertheless, you still try to go on as long as you can.”
The real human damage and hurt caused by this phenomenon is incommensurable. However, a public scientist’s job is to attempt to gauge the immeasurable. So how did Dr. Geronimus and her colleagues scientifically test and quantify the weathering hypothesis? And what have the data shown up to now?
Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com
