Kuzawa - epigenetics, social environment & health disparities

Every society whether it’s based on class, or ethnicity or race, like in the United States race is a big issue, we see big differences in health, in longevity, in risk for things like stroke and cardiovascular disease. And at least in the United States,  traditionally there was an assumption, and there still is an assumption among a lot of researchers that when you talk about race for instance, that the implications of that are that there is a genetic underpinning at least to part of the disparity that you see. Within the social sciences, there’s been a lot of evidence and a big push to kind of revise that, and there’s a realization that a lot of those disparities really traced to things like socioeconomic status, income, education, discrimination; so if you’re being discriminated against this can have adverse effects on things like hypertension, cardiovascular disease. Well epigenetics, the field of epigenetics is bringing a new twist to that story, because it shows the ways in which, how we’re treated by society, whether or not we’re discriminated against, whether or not we experience that kind of stress for instance, how that can actually become part of our biology. If we experience it early in life, and for perhaps if our mothers experienced it when they were pregnant with us, this can actually modify our biology, modify our stress physiology in ways that can persist into later life and contribute to the disparities that we see in adults; things like heart attack etc.  So I think epigenetics provides an important new set of insights into the mechanisms that link social disparities, and how we experience the environment, and how societies treat us in our biology and our health.