Life

Study: Shorter life expectancy for gays living in high prejudice communities

Study: Shorter life expectancy for gays living in high prejudice communities

LGBT-community

Gays, lesbians and bisexual individuals living in communities with high levels of anti-gay prejudice have a shorter life expectancy of 12 years on average compared with their peers in the least prejudiced communities, according to a study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Researchers say it is the first study to look at the consequences of anti-gay prejudice for mortality.

“The results of this study suggest a broadening of the consequences of prejudice to include premature death,” noted the study’s lead author, Mark Hatzenbuehler, PhD, assistant professor of Sociomedical Sciences.

“Our findings indicate that sexual minorities living in communities with higher levels of prejudice die sooner than sexual minorities living in low-prejudice communities, and that these effects are independent of established risk factors for mortality, including household income, education, gender, ethnicity, and age, as well as the average income and education level of residents in the communities where the respondents lived,” said Hatzenbuehler, in a statement.

“In fact, our results for prejudice were comparable to life expectancy differences that have been observed between individuals with and without a high school education,” he said.

The authors also found that suicide, homicide/violence, and cardiovascular diseases were all substantially elevated among sexual minorities in high-prejudice communities.

LGB respondents living in high-prejudice communities died of suicide on average at age 37.5, compared to age 55.7 for those living in low-prejudice communities, a striking 18-year difference.

The study noted that homicide and violence-related deaths are one of the most direct links between hostile community attitudes and death, and results indicated that homicide rates were over three times more likely to occur in high-prejudice communities than in low-prejudice communities.

Of the deaths in high-prejudice communities, 25% were due to cardiovascular disease, compared to 18.6% of deaths in the low-prejudice communities.

“Psychosocial stressors are strongly linked to cardiovascular risk, and this kind of stress may represent an indirect pathway through which prejudice contributes to mortality. Discrimination, prejudice, and social marginalization create several unique demands on stigmatized individuals that are stress-inducing,” said Hatzenbuehler.

The study is also remarkable not just in its conclusions but also in its methods, particularly in the way it quantifies prejudice within a community. As “Dr. Hatzenbuehler points out, the community-level measure of prejudice does not rely on sexual minorities’ perceptions of how stigmatizing their communities are, but rather was based on the prejudicial attitudes of all respondents living in that community.”

The study is online in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

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