Like many things in the United States, health and sickness are distributed unequally. One recent study quantified the "survival gap" between rich and poor: the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans live ten to 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent. Being born in the wrong zip code, another revealed, could take 20 years off your life. And now, a new study shows that, for black people, moving out of segregated neighborhoods is linked to lower blood pressure.The study, conducted by researchers at Northwestern University and published in JAMA Internal Medicine, examined data from more than 2,000 African Americans, drawn from neighborhoods in Chicago, Illinois; Birmingham, Alabama; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Oakland, California. They were part of the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study, which followed participants for about 25 years; they were 18 to 30 years old when it began, and 43 to 55 when it concludedOver that time, researchers looked for associations between individual blood pressure and exposure to segregation. At the beginning of the study, 80 percent of participants lived in highly segregated neighborhoods—an eye-opening statistic in and of itself. Those who moved to less segregated neighborhoods over the course of the study saw a drop in blood pressure: specifically, their systolic blood pressure dropped 1 to 5 points. Those who'd moved to less segregated neighborhoods permanently saw the greatest drop, but even those who moved from their highly segregated neighborhoods and returned saw lasting improvements.Read more on Tonic.
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