Swell Foundations: Fundamental Social Causes and Chronic Inflammation

Abstract

We assess prior research identifying potential causal links between social disadvantage and chronic inflammation, using Fundamental Social Causes (see Link and Phelan 1995 Link, Bruce G. and Jo Phelan. 1995. “Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 36:80–94.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and gender theory.We use ordinary least-squares regression to investigate how social structure and relationship factors predict C-reactive protein serolevels among participants in the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (Waite et al. 2007 Waite, Linda J., Edward O. Laumann, Wendy Levinson, Stacy Tessler Lindau, Martha K. McClintock, Colm A. O'Muircheartaigh, and L. Phillip Schumm. 2007. National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP). Documentation for dataset collected by researchers at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]).Gender predicts chronic inflammation status more strongly and reliably than any other social factor; female participants show significantly higher CRP levels. Other reliable predictors include race, education, and marriage. Black race predicts significantly higher CRP; college education and marriage predict significantly lower CRP. Income predicts CRP inconsistently. Social support and communication variables do not significantly predict CRP in our models.Gender inequalities and pressures may place women at heightened risk for chronic inflammation. Political advocacy and policy action approaches may thus prove more effective than medical interventions for inflammation prevention.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.