Anthropology

Peter Rej Dissertation Defense:
Wednesday July 5th from 10am-noon in Cancer & Genetics Research Complex 133.
Title: Investigating the impact of culturally relevant measures of stress on telomere length
Committee:
Chair: Connie Mulligan
Members: David Daegling, John Krigbaum
External Member: Darlene Kertes
Abstract:
In this dissertation, I explore the idea that stress exposure stemming from one’s sociocultural environment can change health outcomes via shortened telomere length (TL). Telomeres are noncoding repeated DNA sequences located at terminal ends of linear chromosomes. Telomeric DNA buffers against the loss of coding material, as roughly 50 to 200 base pairs of telomeric DNA are lost during each cell replication cycle. Accordingly, critically short telomeres are implicated as a possible mechanism for the onset of age related diseases. The extent of the impact of psychosocial stress on human TL has been debated over the past decade. In order to better investigate the stress-TL relationship, I utilize novel, culturally relevant measures of stress that were developed via ethnographic interviews. I report on three studies where I explore the impact of these stress measures on TL.
My first study is a collaborative project that involved the African American community in Tallahassee, Florida. In this study, I generated TL data and analyzed them with discrimination data collected via ethnographically informed surveys. I discovered that discrimination in the form of self reported unfair treatment attributed to race negatively associated with TL and that individuals who experienced more than three incidents of unfair treatment had significantly shorter telomeres than those who experienced fewer incidents. In the second study, I examined the impact of maternal psychosocial stress stemming from the war in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on maternal, newborn, and placental TL. By including war stress, another ethnographically informed measure of stress, I found a novel negative association between maternal stress and placental TL. Finally, I conducted a novel pilot study, which suggests that DNA methylation of genes related to TL maintenance is not an intermediate mechanism that connects war stress to TL in the DRC. DNA methylation regulates transcription and subsequently influences phenotype; methylation’s role in TL maintenance remains unknown. By integrating concepts and data from the biological and social sciences, my dissertation demonstrates both the validity of using culturally relevant measures of stress when studying differences in TL and the overall benefit of a multidisciplinary approach to research.