Image: Katie Ehrlich's new project takes aim at the effects of adolescent stress and its impact on parents' cardiovascular health. The $3.3 million study is being funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to follow 400 families in the Athens area over a five-year span: How does a teenager’s stress ripple through the family—beyond the emotional tension—to affect their parents’ physical health? That’s the central question driving a newly funded research project led by University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill’s Dr. Melissa Lippold, in collaboration with Dr. Katherine Ehrlich, University of Georgia Professor of Psychology and a Distinguished Scholar at the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research, whose Health and Development Laboratory will spearhead the UGA portion of the work. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., disproportionately affecting minority and low-income populations. Decades of evidence show that daily stressors and strong emotional reactivity to those stressors elevate risks for cardiometabolic disease and inflammation—two major predictors of CVD. What’s new is the project’s focus on how adolescent stress might “crossover” to influence parent health. Early pilot data from Lippold’s lab revealed that, on days when adolescents experienced stressors, their parents were more likely to report negative mood, physical symptoms such as headaches or fatigue, and elevated cortisol—a stress hormone linked to heart disease. Continue reading Image: via OIBR
