A Genetically-Informed Study of Neighborhoods and Health: Results from the MIDUS Twin Sample

People living in adverse neighborhoods, i.e., those that are low income or perceived as unsafe, have poor health (Robinette JW, Charles ST, Almeida DA, Gruenewald TL. Health and Place 2016;41:110-118). Despite a large... [ view full abstract ]

People living in adverse neighborhoods, i.e., those that are low income or perceived as unsafe, have poor health (Robinette JW, Charles ST, Almeida DA, Gruenewald TL. Health and Place 2016;41:110-118). Despite a large literature attesting to the neighborhood-health link, however, general inability to randomly assign people to various neighborhoods causal inference (Diez Roux AV, Mair C. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci 2010;1186:125-145). Using a large sample of adult twins from the Midlife in the United States Study II (MIDUSII), we examined whether neighborhood income and neighborhood safety concerns influence health after adjusting for genetic and environmental selection effects that may have biased previous investigations. Health was assessed with a composite measure of multi-system physiological risk (Gruenewald TL et al. Soc Sci Med 2012;74:75-83), with higher scores representing more physiological dysregulation and risk for future chronic health problems. Neighborhood income was collected from the 2000 United States decennial census, and respondents self-reported neighborhood safety concerns. We used structural equation modeling to fit biometric regressions (Neale MC, Maes HHM. 2004) to a genetically informed sample of 686 pairs of twins (MZF = 140, MZM = 128, DZF = 152, DZM = 89, and DZOS = 177) in the MIDUSII. Controlling for additive genetic and shared environmental processes, results indicated that higher neighborhood safety perceptions were associated with less physiological risk among women but not men. Our findings suggest a possible causal role of neighborhood features for a measure of physiological risk that is associated with the development of disease. Efforts to increase neighborhood safety, perhaps through increased street lighting or neighborhood watch programs, may improve community-level health.