Pilot 4
Alethea Hill, PhD, MSN, RN, ANP-BC
Adult Health Nursing, College of Nursing
University South Alabama
Biography
Dr. Alethea Hill is currently employed as a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of South Alabama (USA) College of Nursing and an Adult Nurse Practitioner in private practice. She obtained her BSN and MSN degree in Nursing from the USA and received a PhD in Nursing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her dissertation focused on the associations between perceived discrimination, allostatic load, and insulin resistance in nondiabetic African American women of the Jackson Heart Study. Dr. Hill’s interest includes the effects of discrimination on health outcomes, cumulative biological risk assessment, cardiovascular risk factors and risk prediction in cardiovascular disease epidemiology. She is also interested in minority women’s health, social/environmental determinants of health, and health disparities. Dr. Hill was recently selected as a SUNY Downstate CVD PRIDE (2011-2012) scholar funded by NHLBI with a focus on cardiovascular epidemiology.
Research Abstract
The associations between perceived discrimination, coping style, social support and cumulative biological risk amon African American men and women
There has been a growing body of literature suggesting discrimination plays a critical role in developing and sustaining differences in health equity. Primarily because discrimination fosters a negative environmental experience and creates social environments that promote suboptimal health outcomes, increased chronic disease prevalence, premature death and deteriorates social health-related quality of life. The extent to which an individual encounters and perceives discrimination throughout their life is associated with long term health consequences. This is particularly true in the case of insulin resistance whose insidious nature precedes devastating consequences, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Although considerable research has been devoted to discrimination and cardiovascular disease in the literature, less attention has been paid to the associations between discrimination and insulin resistance, a critical antecedent and cardiovascular disease risk equivalent. Perceptions of discrimination are a clinically significant predictor of cardiovascular health among African Americans. The fundamental importance to cardiovascular health is multiple paths that directly increase the propensity to impact biological stress pathways. However, the extent to which dimensions of perceived discrimination (acute/chronic); as well as the mediating/moderating effects of coping and social support influences important these pathways in longitudinal studies is largely understudied. Therefore, the specific aims of this study are to : 1) Examine the association between multiple dimensions of perceived discrimination and global as well as domain-specific (neuroendocrine, metabolic, autonomic and immune) summary indices of AL in an all African American cohort and 2) Examine whether behavioral and psychosocial coping factors and social support moderate or mediate the association between perceived discrimination and AL as well as domain-specific AL in an African American cohort.