Current Research

I conducted a literature review to investigate the relationship between the process of aging and social circumstances as well as evaluate whether focusing on alleviating and improving social circumstances is a proper approach for anti-aging researchers. Cellular aging is the biological deterioration of an organism in a way that makes it more susceptible to diseases. I found that it may be caused by telomere shortening, DNA damage, mitochondrial dysfunction as well as many other hallmarks that may induce the death of a cell. In an attempt to relate the process of aging to social circumstances, I found that the connector is chronic stress. Chronic stress may result from living in terrible social circumstances like being unemployed, having a low educational degree that limits an individual's opportunities, living in an unsafe neighborhood... I discovered a lot of research relating chronic stress to the hallmarks of cellular aging that I mentioned above. For example, chronic stress may accelerate telomere shortening and is correlated to DNA damage. Thus, chronic stress may accelerate the process of cellular aging. All in all, it turns out that social circumstances affect the level of stress an individual experiences and such level of stress induces the process of cellular aging early on.

I also discovered many papers that discuss current efforts being conducted in order to combat the process of aging. Many of the current attempts focus on developing pharmacological drugs that lengthen the lifespan of a cell and inhibit the induction of the hallmarks that may cause the cell's death. Besides these attempts, I was curious to know whether focusing efforts on improving an individual's social circumstances may be considered an anti-aging effort. The connection that I found between social circumstances and the process of aging shows that this is possible. However, with the lack of research that directly investigates such a relationship, it is hard to come up with proper conclusions. That is why I proposed to conduct an experiment that looks at the age of onset of the process of aging with respect to social circumstances. Such type of experiment will control for many confounding variables and will provide compelling data that may be used to make any inferences about the process of cellular aging and its relationship to social circumstances.

The questions of the study will be "How does the age of onset of cellular aging compare between African Americans and Whites? Can the difference in the age of onset be attributed to their different social circumstances?” and based on my literature review, my hypothesis is that cellular aging starts earlier in African Americans due to their external social circumstances causing high levels of stress. Participants will be from two groups: African Americans and Whites. They will first be asked to fill out a questionnaire to assess their socioeconomic status as well as another questionnaire to assess the level of stress that they experience on a daily basis. Their outer appearance will then be examined and they will be given a score of 0 if they are considered "not-aged" and a score of 1 if they are considered "aged". Within each race, the ages of the participants will range from 30 to 60 years and there should be 10 participants representing every 5-year interval (i.e., 10 participants between 30 and 34 years, 10 participants between 35 and 39 years...). After each participant is given a score, the average of the scores of every 10 participants within the 5-year interval will be considered the score of that interval. An average score above 0.5 means that the interval is "aged" and an average score below "0.5" means that the interval is "not aged". Based on this, the first age group with an average score above 0.5 will be considered the age of onset of the process of aging for that specific race. The age of onset will then be compared and correlations with social circumstances of levels of stress will be made.

Image Citation

Society. (n.d.). Retrieved from: https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2017/society.jpg