A new study finds that worrying about police brutality and harassment is associated with physical markers of cardiovascular health risk in Black women in the United States. The study found the association was most pronounced for Black women concerned about potential interactions between their children and police.
“There’s a substantial body of work that suggests stress associated with police brutality has significant adverse health effects on Black people in the U.S. – but the bulk of that work has focused on Black men,” says Lori Hoggard, corresponding author of the research paper describing the study and an assistant professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. “We wanted to see if there were associations between police-related stress and adverse health risks in Black women.”
For this study, the researchers recruited 422 Black women, aged 30-46. Study participants were asked a series of questions that captured their experiences with law enforcement, concerns about their own future interactions with law enforcement, and concerns about their children’s potential future interactions with law enforcement.
Based on the responses, the researchers classified study participants into three groups. One group, High Child Vigilance-High Personal Exposure, consisted of 235 women who – relative to the rest of the study participants – reported relatively high levels of concern about their children’s potential interactions with police and were likely, relatively speaking, to have experienced law enforcement harassment.
A second group, No Child Vigilance-High Personal Exposure, consisted of 115 women who either had no children or reported little concern about their children’s potential interactions with police but were likely to have experienced law enforcement harassment themselves.
The third group, Moderate Child Vigilance-Low Self Vigilance-Low Personal Exposure, consisted of 72 women who reported being moderately concerned about their children’s potential interactions with police, were less concerned for themselves, and were less likely than other study participants to have experienced law enforcement harassment.
The researchers also used ultrasound technology to measure carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) for all study participants. Carotid IMT refers to the measurement of the thickness of the inner layers of the carotid artery. Because thickened inner layers of the carotid artery indicate increased likelihood of cardiovascular health problems, carotid IMT serves as a marker of cardiovascular risk.
“One key takeaway here is the role that concern for children plays,” Hoggard says. “Women in the No Child Vigilance-High Personal Exposure group, who had experienced first-hand harassment at the hands of law enforcement, had lower IMT thickness than either of the other two groups. In other words, even women who had not experienced police harassment – but did have a moderate or high level of concern for how law enforcement might interact with their kids – had thicker IMT measurements than women who had experienced police harassment but did not have concern for children.”
The researchers controlled for study participant age, income, and other demographic and medical variables, suggesting that those factors did not account for the findings.
“This study can only show correlation, not causation, but it suggests that the stress caused by worrying about their children’s interactions with police may be greater than the stress that Black women are experiencing with regard to their own potential interactions with police,” Hoggard says. “What’s more, the increased IMT thickness of both the High Child Vigilance and Moderate Child Vigilance groups was comparable. This raises additional questions about whether there is a threshold level of stress that may be related to this cardiovascular risk marker.
“Black women generally have higher rates of cardiovascular disease than their counterparts, and are diagnosed with these health problems earlier,” Hoggard says. “This study raises the question of whether vigilance for their children may be a significant contributing factor. That question merits additional research moving forward.
“These findings also underscore the importance of developing policy solutions that can help address the underlying challenges that contribute to these concerns and related stress,” says Hoggard.
The paper, “Police-Related Stress and Carotid Intima-Media Thickness Among African American Women,” is published in the journal Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine. The paper was co-authored by Raphiel Murden, Shivika Udaipuria, Viola Vaccarino, Arshed Quyyumi and Tené Lewis of Emory University; Nicole Fields of Northwestern University; Christy Erving of The University of Texas at Austin; Reneé Moore of Drexel University; and Emma Barinas-Mitchell of the University of Pittsburgh.
This work was done with support from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute under grants R01 HL130471, R01 HL158141, K24 HL163696 and T32 HL130025; and from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, under grant P2CHD042849.