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a cce s s H ea l t h N ews . n e t M a rc h 2 0 2 6 Volume 11 | Issue No. 104 26 aH The 'Weathering' Ofi Black Women And Its Implications on Health And Mortality Published in August 2020 I f you are fatigued from the hate-filled vitriol televised or posted daily, you are in good company… so is former First Lady Michelle Obama. In the second episode of her new podcast, The Michelle Obama Podcast, she spoke with friend Michele Norris and former longtime host of NPR's All Things Considered. "I know that I am dealing with some form of low-grade depression," Mrs. Obama said. "Not just because of quarantine, but because of the racial strife, and just seeing this administration, watching the daily hypocrisy of it all, day in and day out, is dispiriting." Racism, discrimination, and marginalization are the prerequisites for depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other disorders that fuel racial health care disparities. Arline Geronimus, Sc.D., Professor of Public Health at the University of Michigan, calls this "weathering, the cumulative effect of stress resulting from racial discrimination, long-term exposure to environmental toxins, redlining that limits essential services, disproportionate victimization by crime…" and the proverbial list for people of color continues. Geronimus likens weathering to the body's way of eroding due to constant stress and marginalization. In ScienceDirect's published abstract on Racial Differences in Weathering and its Associations with Psychosocial Stress: The CARDIA Study, biological age (BA) is defined as a "construct that captures accelerated biological age a ributed to wear and tear from various exposures." The weathering hypothesis, which Geronimus coined, is now recognized by scholars and researchers as the measured distance from BA and chronological age, and how that dichotomy correlates with race and psychosocial factors. According to the authors, experiences of racism that lead to stress and anxiety can manifest for some black people in three harmful ways: perceptions of lack of control over one's environment; internalized racism and negative self-evaluation; and avoiding distressing emotions. The article states that one in four black Americans will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in life and is more likely to suffer from social anxiety disorder. According to the article, symptoms associated with anxiety persist longer for black Americans compared with the general population. The CARDIA (Coronary Artery Risk in Young Adults) study backs this up. It used a middle-aged, bi-racial cohort in four U.S. cities from 1985-2016 to examine weathering for adults aged 48-60 years. Using selected biomarkers (measurable factors that indicate disease, infection, environmental exposure, etc.), the study assessed overall race-specific associations between weathering and psychosocial measures. For the 2,694 participants, blacks had a BA 11.8 years older than their chronological age, compared with whites, who had an average BA 10.0 years younger than their chronological age.