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The Impact of Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and Pollutants in Latinx Adolescents’ Stress Physiology

Wed, April 7, 4:20 to 5:50pm EDT (4:20 to 5:50pm EDT), Virtual

Abstract

The experience of poverty embodies complex, multi-dimensional stressors that may adversely affect physiological and psychological domains of functioning. Yet, the overwhelming majority of poverty research only implicitly recognizes the complexity of this experience by actually measuring family income. However, that financial aspect of family poverty typically coincides with additional environmental risks such as pollution exposure, housing burden, elevated neighborhood unemployment, and lower neighborhood education levels (Evans & English, 2002). Despite mounting evidence that chronic exposure to such environmental risks worsens youth’s mental and physical health (Brooks-Gunn et al., 1993, Roubinov et al., 2018), few studies have examined if they have dissociable effects on youths’ stress physiology. In this study, we investigated the associations of multidimensional environmental correlates of poverty throughout adolescence with autonomic nervous system (ANS) and hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis reactivity. Based on Allostatic load theory (McEwen, 2007) and previous work examining how pollution might conflate with neighborhood risks predicting maladaptive stress responses (Thomson, 2019), we expected that family poverty, neighborhood conditions, and air and water quality to each independently predict (1) higher cortisol at baseline (or afternoon) and sympathetic activity at rest, and (2) hypocortisolism or co-inhibition of both ANS branches during a stressor.

229 Mexican-American adolescents (48.6% female) were assessed annually between the ages of 10 and 16. Parent’s reported on family income (Mincome= $30,000-$35,000) and household roster (Mroster= 5.47 people). Participants’ census tracts were matched with administrative data of neighborhood housing burden (proportion of low-income households with 50% of income spent on rent), education (% of population with bachelor’s degree), unemployment, drinking water quality, and fine particulate matter (PM 2.5). At 17 years, adolescents completed Cyberball, a social exclusion simulation task while undergoing magnetic resonance imaging. Electrodermal responses (EDA) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) were collected during Cyberball, and saliva samples were collected prior to the task and five times over a 50-minute period following the MRI scan. Saliva samples were assayed for cortisol. We calculated cross-system autonomic balance and regulation to represent autonomic coordination. Two structural equation models correcting for census-tract clustering were used to examine the cumulative and independent effects of risks on HPA and ANS functioning.

Family income-to-needs, neighborhood conditions, and pollution all predicted ANS activity (see Fig. 1) For example, PM 2.5 exposure and low income-to-needs predicted sympathetic dominance at baseline, and PM 2.5 and drinking water quality predicted sympathetic-parasympathetic co-inhibition in response to Cyberball. Conversely, only neighborhood conditions predicted HPA activity, with greater unemployment predicting increased cortisol in response to the social exclusion paradigm (Fig. 2).

Our preliminary results provide support for specific effects of pollutants and neighborhood SES on adolescent stress physiology, reinforcing the idea that developing neurobiology is one possible underlying factor in the link between multidimensional poverty and mental and physical health risk. Further, cumulative exposure to air pollutants and family income provides support for the allostatic load model, but only for the ANS. Future research will integrate measures of inflammation as a potential explanatory pathway linking toxins with multi-system physiology.

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