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To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.05.039 Byline: Victoria Reyes-Garcia (a), Jose Luis Molina (b), Thomas W. McDade (c), Susan N. Tanner (d), Tomas Huanca (e), William R. Leonard (c) Abstract: Research on the social determinants of health has highlighted (a) the adverse effects of social inequality on individual health and (b) the association between individual social rank and health. In this paper, we contribute to the growing literature on the health consequences of social inequalities by assessing the association between village level inequality in social rank, a form of non-material inequality, and indicators of nutritional status. We use quantitative survey information from 289 men (18+ years of age) from a society of forager-farmers in the Bolivian Amazon (Tsimane'). We construct village level measures of non-material inequality by using individual measures of men's positions in the village hierarchy according to prestige (or freely conferred deference) and dominance (or social rank obtained through power). We find that village inequality in dominance, but not village inequality in prestige, is associated with short-term indices of individual nutritional status. Doubling the coefficient of variation of dominance in a village would be associated to a 6.7% lower BMI, a 7.9% smaller mid-arm circumference, and a 27.1% smaller sum of four skin folds of men in the village. We also find that once we decouple individual social rank based on dominance from individual social rank based on prestige, only prestige-based social rank is associated with nutritional status. Potential explanations for our findings relate to the differential forms of resource access derived from the two forms of social hierarchies and to the social and psychological benefits associated with prestige versus the social costs and psychological stress generated by dominance. Author Affiliation: (a) ICREA and Institut de Ciencia i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat AutA[sup.2]noma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellatera, Barcelona, Spain (b) Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Universitat AutA[sup.2]noma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain (c) Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill 60208, USA (d) Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA (e) CBIDSI, San Borja, Beni, Bolivia Article Note: (footnote) [star] Research was funded by grants from the Cultural Anthropology and Physical Anthropology Programs, NSF (BCS-0134225, BCS-0200767, BCS-0322380).

Research with humans and non-human primate species has found an association between social rank and individual health. Among humans, a robust literature in industrial societies has shown that each step down the rank hierarchy is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Here, we present supportive evidence for the social gradient in health drawing on data from 289 men (18+ years of age) from a society of foragers-farmers in the Bolivian Amazon (Tsimane'). We use a measure of social rank that captures the locally perceived position of a man in the hierarchy of important people in a village. In multivariate regression analysis we found a positive and statistically significant association between social rank and three standard indicators of nutritional status: body mass index (BMI), mid-arm circumference, and the sum of four skinfolds. Results persisted after controlling for material and psychosocial pathways that have been shown to mediate the association between individual socioeconomic status and health in industrial societies. Future research should explore locally-relevant psychosocial factors that may mediate the association between social status and health in non-industrial societies. Keywords: Bolivia Tsimane' Amerindians Social gradient Social rank BMI Nutrition

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.09.005 Byline: Thomas W. McDade Keywords: Stress; Neuroendocrine biomarkers; Allostatic load; Culture; Social relations; Health; Taiwan; USA; Neuroendocrine allostatic load (NAL) Abstract: A new generation of research in population health is drawing on models and methods from the social and biomedical sciences to combine rich measurement of everyday contexts with objective measures of physiological function and health in field-based settings. We are at the beginning of an exciting era of discovery, and this commentary focuses on two questions of particular importance to comparative research. First, how do we use biological measures to define 'health'? Second, how do we define and measure social context, particularly across cultural settings? Answers to these questions, as well as others addressed by scholars working at the intersection of the social and biomedical sciences, will ultimately lead to a better, more multidimensional understanding of human biology and health. Author Affiliation: Department of Anthropology and Cells to Society (C2S): The Center on Social Disparities and Health at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, 1810 Hinman Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208, USA

Researchers and development organizations have shown interest in individual empowerment because it presumably improves well-being. Estimates of empowerment's effects on well-being contain biases from the potential endogeneity of empowerment. Using data from a sexually egalitarian and highly autarkic society of foragers and horticulturalists in the Bolivian Amazon, the Tsimane', we overcome the problems that this poses by: (1) matching spouses' responses to the same questions about who makes decisions or who breaks ties in 10 domains to improve accuracy in measures of empowerment; and (2) using parental attributes of spouses as instrumental variables for spousal empowerment. Outcomes include two anthropometric indices of short-run nutritional status: body-mass index and age and sex-standardized z scores of mid-arm muscle area. The amount of empowerment of household heads did not affect their nutritional status or other indicators of their well-being, such as income, wealth, expenditures, happiness, social capital, or self-perceived health. It also did not affect the nutritional status of their offspring. Nor did it affect the difference in income, wealth, or monetary expenditures between spouses. The insubstantial effects persisted with other definitions of empowerment or types of regressions. We end with a discussion of why empowerment, despite its popularity in development discourse, has such tenuous finks with objective indicators of well-being, and the implication of this finding for future studies of empowerment's effects. Keywords: Anthropometries; Empowerment; Nutritional status; Tsimane'; Bolivia; Human capital

Researchers have found a positive association between income inequality and poor individual health. To explain the link, researchers have hypothesized that income inequality erodes community social capital, which unleashes negative emotions, stress, and stress behaviors that hurt health. Few studies have tested the hypothesized path. Here we estimate the association between (a) village income inequality and social capital, and (b) three distinct negative emotions (anger, fear, sadness) and one stress behavior (alcohol consumption). We use four quarters of panel data (2002-2003) from 655 adults in 13 villages of a foraging-farming society in the Bolivian Amazon (Tsimane'). We found that: (1) village income inequality was associated with more negative emotions but with less alcohol consumption, (2) social capital always bore a negative association with outcomes, and (3) results held up after introducing many changes to the main model. We conclude that village income inequality probably affects negative emotions and stress behaviors through other paths besides social capital because we conditioned for social capital. One such path is an innate dislike of inequality, which might have pre-human origins. Our prior research with the Tsimane' suggests that village income inequality bore an insignificant association with individual health. Therefore, village income inequality probably affects negative emotions and stress behaviors before undermining health. Keywords: Bolivia; Tsimane'; Health; Income inequality; Emotions; Social capital

The perceptions of social status in the Western world and their effect on the physical health of Samoan youth are discussed. Culture change has a substantial effect on the physical health of immigeant youth.

The health consequences of rapid cultural and economic change have been explored for adults in a range of low-income countries, but comparable research in children and adolescents is currently lacking. Concurrently, the immunosuppressive effects of psychosocial stress have been documented in Western populations, but have yet to be considered in cross-cultural contexts. This study uses lifestyle incongruity (inconsistency between a household's material style of life and its socioeconomic status) as a model of culture change and stress, and considers its impact on immune function in a sample of 230 10-20 year-olds from (Western) Samoa. Anthropometric, lifestyle, and psychosocial data were collected, as well as finger prick blood spot samples for analysis of C-reactive protein (marker of infection) and antibodies against the Epstein-Barr virus (marker of cell-mediated immune function). Controlling for potential confounders, adolescents from households with a material style of life that exceeds its socioeconomic status have reduced cell-mediated immune function, indicating an increased burden of psychosocial stress. Social relationships moderate this effect: lifestyle incongruity stress is pronounced among adolescents with a high degree of social integration, and absent in adolescents with low social integration. This finding is counter to the buffering role of social support reported in previous applications of lifestyle incongruity to adults, and suggests that the moderating role of social integration may be unique to adolescents. The potential utility of the lifestyle incongruity model for future cross-cultural studies of child and adolescent stress is discussed. Keywords: Status inconsistency; Westernization; Psychoneuroimmunology; Adolescence; South Pacific

Urban environments have been linked to a range of human health issues, and as the pace of urbanization accelerates, new challenges arise to characterize these environments, and to understand their positive and negative implications for health. We seek to contribute to future studies of urbanization and health by exploring multiple definitions of urbanicity in the Philippines, using data from an ongoing, longitudinal study. We use factor analysis to identify meaningful clusters of household- and community-level variables, and to generate factor scores that summarize each household's position with respect to access to infrastructure and health services, and level of affluence. Factor scores are considered for 1983 and 1994 to assess the type and pace of change that has occurred in the Philippines, and scores are compared across urban and rural areas, and across six different settlement types, to explore household- and community-level markers of urbanicity. This analysis demonstrates the heterogeneity of environments within urban and rural areas, and emphasizes the need for a finer level of investigation in future studies of urbanization and health. Keywords: Urbanization; Urban health; Urban population; Rural population

Objectives We used detailed saliva sampling procedures to test for diurnal changes in men's salivary estradiol (E2) and testosterone (T) and assessed whether greater adiposity predicted higher E2 and T. Methods We drew on a subsample of young adults enrolled in a long-running birth cohort study in Metro Cebu, Philippines. Subjects provided saliva samples at four time points during the day (waking, waking +40 min, early evening, and bedtime), which were assayed for E2 and T. Using these detailed hormonal data, we calculated E2 ( n = 29) and T ( n = 44) area-under-the-curve values, which provide insights on hormonal production over the study period. Results While T declined immediately after waking and reached a nadir in the early evening, E2 did not show significant diurnal change ( P ≥ 0.1) but was positively correlated to T at multiple time points ( P ≤ 0.05). Subjects with higher adiposity (BMI, waist circumference, skinfolds) had elevated E2 secretion throughout the day ( P ≤ 0.01), but adiposity was not related to salivary T. Conclusions Consistent with past research, our results indicate that adipose tissue is a significant site of E2 production in males but differ from a limited number of prior studies of young men in that we did not find lower T with increasing adiposity. Given E2's role in male hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal function and complex interfaces with the immune system, these results have important implications for models of male life history as rates of overweight and obesity rise in populations around the world. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 26:376-383, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

C-reactive protein (CRP) is a component of nonspecific immune defense and is a reliable marker of low-grade inflammation involved in obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Genome-wide association studies in middle-aged and elderly populations, predominantly of European descent, demonstrated associations of CRP levels with single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) at several loci. To examine whether the variants identified are replicated in Filipino young adults, we applied Tobit regression models to study the association of plasma CRP with 12 SNPs at seven loci in a cohort of 1691 Filipino young adults (aged 21.5±0.3 years) from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey. SNPs in or near CRP (P=3.2 × 10−11), HNF1A, IL6R, APOE-APOC1 and LEPR showed significant associations (P<0.05) and together explained 4.8% of the total variation in CRP. Modest interactions were observed between LEPR-rs1892534 and waist circumference (uncorrected Pinteraction=0.020) and between APOE-rs769449 and pathogen exposure (uncorrected Pinteraction=0.0073) in models predicting CRP. Our results demonstrated that variants in several loci are significantly associated with plasma CRP in Filipino young adults, suggesting shared genetic influences on circulating CRP across populations and age groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Evolutionary theory suggests that natural selection favors the evolution of cognitive abilities which allow humans to use facial cues to assess traits of others. The use of facial and somatic cues by humans has been studied mainly in western industrialized countries, leaving unanswered whether results are valid across cultures. Methodology/Principal Findings: Our objectives were to test (i) if previous finding about raters' ability to get accurate information about an individual by looking at his facial photograph held in low-income non western rural societies and (ii) whether women and men differ in this ability. To answer the questions we did a study during July-August 2007 among the Tsimane', a native Amazonian society of foragers-farmers in Bolivia. We asked 40 females and 40 males 16-25 years of age to rate four traits in 93 facial photographs of other Tsimane' males. The four traits were based on sexual selection theory, and included health, dominance, knowledge, and sociability. The rating scale for each trait ranged from one (least) to four (most). The average rating for each trait was calculated for each individual in the photograph and regressed against objective measures of the trait from the person in the photograph. We found that (i) female Tsimane' raters were able to assess facial cues related to health, dominance, and knowledge and (ii) male Tsimane' raters were able to assess facial cues related to dominance, knowledge, and sociability. Conclusions/Significance: Our results support the existence of a human ability to identify objective traits from facial cues, as suggested by evolutionary theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within anthropology and human biology, there is growing interest in immune function and its importance to the ecology of human health and development. Biomedical research currently dominates our understanding of immunology, and this paper seeks to highlight the potential contribution of a population-based, ecological approach to the study of human immune function. Concepts from life-history theory are applied to highlight the major challenges and demands that are likely to shape immune function in a range of ecological contexts. Immune function is a major component of maintenance effort, and since resources are limited, trade-offs are expected between investment in maintenance and other critical life-history functions involving growth and reproduction. An adaptationist, life-history perspective helps make sense of the unusual developmental trajectory of immune tissues, and emphasizes that this complex system is designed to incorporate information from the surrounding ecology to guide its development. As a result, there is substantial population variation in immune development and function that is not considered by current biomedical approaches. In an attempt to construct a framework for understanding this variation, immune development is considered in relation to the competing life-history demands that define gestation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Each life stage poses a unique set of adaptive challenges, and a series of hypotheses is proposed regarding their implications for immune development and function. Research in human ecological immunology is in its earliest stages, but this is a promising area of exploration, and one in which anthropology is well-positioned to make important contributions. Yrbk Phys Anthropol 46:100-125, 2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]