Social Genomics Model of Health Disparities

Social stress such as financial scarcity, childhood trauma, and neighborhood violence has been associated with worse health outcomes. Furthemore, the social stress one experiences is not accidental. Rather, it can be the result of systematic economic and social marginalization through social policies, built environment and neighborhood underdevelopment from structural racism and discrimination. The psychological and physical stress associated with social exposure risk has been identified as possible explanatory variables for the disparities in health outcomes we have previously assigned to "race." We will use lung cancer as a use case to illustrate a novel model that links social exposure, behavioral risk and the stress response to outcomes.