Allostatic Load

I had a rare opportunity to attend the Understanding Society Master Class the other day. The topic was allostatic load, led by Prof. Teresa Seeman from UCLA. Mentored by McEwen,  she has worked in the area for many years and developed the markers of 'allostatic load' which explained as 'dysregulation of body system' during the master class.


What interested me most is when she showed her slide about mediation analysis. She showed mortality by education and poor emotional support in her study. Then she showed how much of allostatic load explained the association between explanatory factors (education or poor emotional support).

Could you guess?

35-36%.
Is that all?
We were not told the raw figures. Be aware that it is all relative sense.


Let's put this into the ICLS's social-biological interface conceptual framework
 (Exposures)               (Processes)            (Outcomes)
Social structural     Material                    health/death
Behavioural           CNS mediated
Interpersonal          Epigenetic


Allostatic load can be equated into the processes (all biological) in this context.
It means our body is worn/tore by surrounding exposures that are distorted by our social structures. Still, there are many other factors that determine the course of our health, well-being and death over and above our biological response.

We could argue that socially determined exposures are likely to cluster or chained (accumulated) and interact with the biological process. Yes in that sense, we need to build a model accordingly and 'biologically plausible' manners which ICLS has been emphasising through their social-biological day course.

Given that the allostatic load is an indication of our body being 'dysregulated,' we can tell that our body is deviated from the state of 'well-being' with a higher allostatic load. But partical mediation means we could die from other factors, possibly at the macro level (upstream) such as access to health care in addition to wear and tear on our bodies.  We all know that which has been discussed in the context of Krieger's 'embodiment'.

To me it is all our role to join the dots together to understand a bigger picture of social determinants of health/health inequalities through cross-disciplinary discussion. I hope many more discussions will take place after this master course.