Purpose The present study investigated the psycho-physiological inter and intra-individual processes that mediate the linkage between child years/adolescent socioeconomic adversities and adult health outcomes. Results provide evidence for (a) the influence of early child years and early adolescent cumulative socioeconomic adversity on both the initial levels and changes over time of depressive symptoms and BMI and (b) the impartial influences depressive symptoms and BMI trajectories on the general health and the physical Purmorphamine illnesses of young adults Conclusions These findings contribute valuable knowledge to existing research by elucidating how early adversity exerts an enduring long-term influence on physical health problems in young adulthood; further this information suggests effective intervention and prevention programs should incorporate multiple facets (severity and change over time) of multiple mechanisms (psychological and physiological). to 3== .02). Parent and adolescent general health A single item of general health (i.e. how is usually your health on a level from 1-‘excellent’ to 5-‘poor’) from wave 1 for both the parent respondent and the adolescent respondent were used as covariates. A parallel single item indication of general health at wave 4 for the target respondent was assessed as a measure of global young adult health. Race/ethnicity At wave 1 adolescents reported their race/ethnicity. The variables were dummy-coded by dichotomizing the presence of African-American Hispanic Asian Native-American and Caucasian racial/ethnic statuses. Caucasians were used as a reference group. For multi-racial respondents only the first choice of race/ethnicity category was considered. Gender Gender was coded as male (0) or female (1). Biological parental obesity Parental obesity assessed at wave 1 dichotomously (0-no is not obese 1 is usually obese) for the target adolescents’ biological mother and biological father was included as a covariate. At wave 1 18.5% of biological mothers were obese and 10.3% of fathers were obese. Health insurance Target adolescent’s health insurance status assessed at wave 4 was included as a covariate using a Purmorphamine single item determining the presence and Purmorphamine type of health insurance (i.e. no insurance Medicaid parents’ health insurance etc.) the individual currently experienced. At wave 4 20.7% of participants did not have health insurance. Biological proxy markers At wave 4 dry blood spot Rabbit Polyclonal to NUCKS1. biospecimen samples were collected and analyzed to determine cholesterol levels hemoglobin A1C levels and blood glucose levels. Systolic blood pressure (SBP) diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and pulse rate were obtained at the time of assessment. These biomarker proxies were analyzed separately as biological proxies related to the young adult physical illnesses (i.e. heart disease) that reflect physiological dysregulation. For more details on collection methods please consult Add Health codebooks which are available online (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth/codebooks). Analysis Plan We tested the theoretical model in a bivariate parallel latent growth curve model (LGM) in a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework to estimate individual trajectories using Mplus (version731). Individual sample weights from Wave 1 were used to account for oversampling of smaller population groups. We Purmorphamine used the TYPE=COMPLEX analysis syntax in order to change for potential bias in standard errors and chi square computation due to the lack of individual independence between observations within colleges in the Add Health data. Missing data were accounted for using the Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML) procedures.34 We used the Comparative Fit Index (CFI ≥ .90) and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA ≤ .06) to evaluate model fit.35 Results Table 2 presents correlations among study variables as well as descriptive statistics of main study variables. A slight positive skewness in physical illness at wave 4 was accounted for by using the weighted least squares imply adjusted (?甒LSM’-Type 5) estimator in MPlus. Table 2 Descriptives and correlations of study variables Table 3 includes growth parameter estimates from unconditional univariate latent growth curve (LGC) models of depressive symptoms and BMI..