In Review: Discover

Housing policies established more than eight decades ago that effectively trapped people of color in low-income and segregated neighborhoods continue to have an impact on the health of residents. That’s the conclusion of a study in the journal JAMA Open Network by Rochester researchers in obstetrics and gynecology and public health sciences.

“These findings suggest the potential influences of a system of profound structural inequity that ripple forward in time, with impacts that extend beyond measurable socioeconomic inequality,” says coauthor Elaine Hill, an economist in the Department of Public Health Sciences and leader of the Health and Environmental Economics Lab. “In our study population of a single midsized US city, historic redlining was associated with worse outcomes in pregnancy and childbirth experienced by Black women in the modern day.”

In the 1930s, the federal government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to rescue families about to default and to expand homeownership among the working and middle classes. Enlisting local real estate agents to assess risk, the corporation created thousands of color-coded maps of metropolitan areas, signifying risky areas in red. The presence of African Americans automatically earned a red designation—hence the term “redlining.” The maps were later adopted by the Federal Housing Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs to delineate areas where mortgages could be insured.

The redlining policies, which remained in effect until the 1960s, led to decades of community disinvestment, concentrated poverty, and denied residents the ability to build intergenerational wealth through home ownership. The health impacts of redlining have long been suspected, but the digitization of the original maps by the University of Richmond Mapping Inequality project has enabled researchers to examine more precisely the physical toll taken by such practices.

The Medical Center group—Hill along with Stephanie Hollenbach, Loralei Thornburg, and Christopher Glantz of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology—focused on obstetric outcomes, using a New York State database of live births from 2005 to 2018. The team identified preterm births (less than 37 weeks) by zip code; demographic characteristics of individuals, including race; and community survey data from the US Census Bureau on income, poverty, and educational attainment.

Preterm births are associated with a range of outcomes, including a higher risk of developmental disorders as well as sudden infant death syndrome. Of the nearly 200,000 births during the period, preterm births occurred at a rate of 12.38 percent in so-called “hazardous” zip codes compared to 7.55 percent in areas labeled “best” or “still desirable.” Women who lived in “hazardous” areas were at higher risk for maternal complications, including admission to a neonatal intensive care unit.

Coauthor Hollenbach says the study offers further evidence that a legacy of structural racism results in a disproportional burden of adverse pregnancy outcomes on Black women in the US.

“The fact that racially discriminatory home lending patterns from the 1940s are associated with contemporary preterm birth rates can inform us that the legacy of government-sanctioned discrimination persists to this day.”

—Mark Michaud

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Bad Stress, Good Stress

Sweaty palms during a job interview. Stomach pains ahead of a final exam. Many people have experienced a classic stress response in new, unusual, or high-pressure circumstances.

But what if you could treat your stress response as a tool rather than an obstacle? Jeremy Jamieson, an associate professor of psychology and the principal investigator at the University’s Social Stress Lab, has trained adolescents and young adults at a community college to do just that.

“We use a type of ‘saying is believing’ approach whereby participants learn about the adaptive benefits of stress, and they are prompted to write about how it can help them achieve,” says Jamieson.

In the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, the team found that in addition to reducing anxiety, the “good stress” mind-set reset helped students score higher on tests, procrastinate less, stay enrolled in classes, and respond to academic challenges in a healthier way.

—Sandra Knispel

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Turning the Tide in Study of Ocean Currents

Ocean currents, propelled by kinetic energy from the wind, are the great moderators of Earth’s climate. By transferring heat from the equator to polar regions, the currents help make our planet habitable. And yet, the large-scale models used by scientists to study the complex system fail to accurately account for the impact of wind on the ocean’s most energetic components: swirling, mesoscale eddies.

In a paper in Science Advances, Hussein Aluie, associate professor of mechanical engineering, lead author Shikhar Rai, a PhD student in Aluie’s research group, and collaborators at Los Alamos National Laboratory describe how the wind, which propels larger currents, has the opposite effect on eddies less than 260 kilometers in size. The result is a phenomenon called “eddy killing.”

The team applied a modeling approach called coarse graining—a method of simplification often used to simulate complex systems—to satellite imagery. Coarse-grained models provide a more detailed spatial analysis than is possible with methods used by most oceanographers, which concentrate on temporal fluctuations. Those methods either fail to account for the impact of eddy killing or provide wildly varying estimates.

“On the one hand the wind is making the ocean move, and yet it is killing the part of it that is the most energetic,” Aluie says.

The researchers hope that the method will be adapted by oceanographers to further explore other factors that may influence eddy killing, and the role such eddies play in other aspects of the oceans’ circulation, heat flow, salt concentrations, and up-welling of nutrients and marine organisms.

—Bob Marcotte

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Clues to Why COVID-19 Symptoms May Vary

COVID-19 is known to trigger a wide range of symptoms in people who have been infected, some lasting even long after individuals test negative for the virus. Yet the mechanisms by which COVID-19 causes such diverse complications remain poorly understood.

Seeking to understand the mechanisms, John (Jack) Werren, the Nathaniel and Helen Wisch Professor of Biology, along with Austin Varela ’20 and Sammy Cheng ’21, studied proteins that closely evolve with Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the receptor used by the SARS-CoV-2 virus to enter human cells.

In a paper published in the journal PeerJ, Werren and the team identified a number of candidate “protein partners” for ACE2 that have not previously been known as ACE2 interactors, but which could have direct bearing on the complications experienced by people infected with the virus.

For example, one hallmark of severe COVID-19 is abnormal blood coagulation throughout the body. The team found connections between ACE2 and key proteins involved in the coagulation pathway. Another protein, Clusterin, which plays a significant role in “quality control” in the blood, strongly coevolves with ACE2—implying that they interact with each other biologically.

“We propose that ACE2 has novel protein interactions that are disrupted during SARS-CoV-2 infection, contributing to the spectrum of COVID-19 pathologies,” Werren says.

“These candidate protein interactions will need to be validated,” he adds. “But if supported, our findings could inform development of better treatments and therapeutics for COVID-19 and chronic complications that may arise.”

—Lindsey Valich