| I did research briefly in a lab studying heart rate variability. HRV is a really interesting statistic in predicting heart health outcomes, and very interesting is the racial difference in HRV. Basically, African Americans exhibit much higher heart rate variability, meaning their nervous system is much quicker to react to stimuli (quicker time to fight or flight response, for example) and this still isn’t well understood in the field. A naive understanding is that racial physiology is just different. And plenty of people will stand by this. However, self reported stress scores offer some insight into the difference. High stress African Americans with High HRV lived as long as Low stress, low HRV White/Asian Americans. Most likely, the process by which the nervous system regulates itself is heavily influenced by life course events. Medical science, in my experience, lacks in quantifying these social factors, and too often underplays their significance in determining physiological differences. Humans are incredibly dynamic systems, and the case can be made that we adapt to stimuli in order to survive. It’s certainly possible that the physiological difference we observe in different racial populations is due to survival based on this principal. It’s only recently that I’ve seen research trying to get at these social/physiological mechanisms, but as far as funding is concerned, hard biological sciences are more interesting. Everyone just wants to edit the genome and call it a day, but I think we could get much further if we understood how life events lead to physiological ailments later in life. |