Brief report: Neighborhood disadvantage and hair cortisol among older urban African Americans

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that living in poor neighborhoods is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. However, researchers are now investigating the biological pathways responsible for the deleterious effects of neighborhood disadvantage on health. This study investigated whether neighborhood disadvantage (i.e., a measure of relative neighborhood quality derived by combining social and built environmental conditions) was associated with hair cortisol—a retrospective indicator of long-term hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis activation—and whether this link would be mediated by self-reported neighborhood satisfaction. Forty-nine older African Americans were recruited from thirty-nine Detroit census tracts across five strata of census tract adversity. Participants were interviewed face-to-face to collect psychosocial measures. Each provided a hair sample for analysis of cortisol. Multiple regression analyses revealed that higher neighborhood disadvantage was associated with higher levels of hair cortisol levels and that neighborhood satisfaction partially explained this association. These results are the first to our knowledge to demonstrate a direct link between neighborhood disadvantage and hair cortisol in a sample of older adults and to show that self-reported neighborhood satisfaction may be a psychological intermediary of this association.