Medical Anthropology (ANG 6737)

In class this week, we briefly discussed the recent paper by Lauderdale and colleagues, which compared rates of preterm delivery for all births in California during six months before and after September 11, 2001. For women with Arabic names — and only for women with Arabic names — the risk of having a low birth weight baby increased 34% in the six months after 9/11.

Now, a new paper in the journal Human Reproduction reports that the trauma of September 11 also had an impact on the distribution of birthweight in New York City. Eskenazi and colleagues analyzed birth certificate data for all births in NYC and in upstate New York between January 1996 and December 2002. They found an increase in the number of babies born with low birth weights in the week following Sept. 11 in NYC, but not in upstate New York. They also found an increased risk of low birthweight for infants born around the New Year and for those born 33-36 weeks after Sept. 11. The first group would have been in the first or second trimester of gestation on Sept. 11; the second would have been conceived on or around Sept. 11.

The authors interpret these patterns in terms of the stress process. For women living in NYC, the World Trade Center disaster would have been a particularly traumatic event. The physiological response to such an acute stressor may have led to early birth and lower birthweight for some infants. Eskenazi and colleagues are not able to test the hypothesis thoroughly, because they did not have access to high quality data on gestational age. But in the context of other work on the stress process and pregnancy outcomes, the hypothesis is certainly plausible.

Of course, the acute trauma of September 11 is altogether different from the chronic stressors of everyday life. What significance do you think this new study has for our understanding of social inequalities in birth outcomes?

Romantic relationships can fill you with happiness, but these same relationships can also be a significant source of stress in daily life. The results of a new study, recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, suggest that relationship difficulties can quite literally break your heart.

In examining data from a long-term cohort study of British civil servants, the authors find that negative interactions in close relationships increase risk for incident coronary heart disease. This relationship exists even when controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, biological and psychosocial factors, and health-related behaviors. The results suggest that negative interactions are more likely to occur in women and lower-income civil servants; however, negative interactions produce similar effects on heart disease regardless of sex or social position.

Does this interaction seem to you like a human universal, a product of our shared evolutionary heritage? Or is this more likely the product of Western society? In light of your recent readings on the interaction of stress, human biology, and culture, how might we examine Western notions of romantic love and the meaning of negative interactions in a cross-cultural comparison to explore these questions?