Stress on the body caused by racism may cut African American women’s lives short, according to a recent study by neuroscientists at Harvard and Emory universities.
Their research, published in the journal JAMA Network Open in June, found a connection between “higher self-reported racial discrimination” and “DNA methylation age acceleration” among black women.
“Racism steals time from people’s lives – possibly because of the space it occupies in the mind,” lead researchers Negar Fani and Nathaniel Harnett wrote in an article this week at The Conversation.
Fani is a professor at Emory and Harnett at Harvard, both in the areas of psychiatry and neuroscience. Both also receive funding from the National Institutes of Health, according to the article.