Weathering: Stress and Heart Disease in African American Women Living in Chicago

Abstract

Researchers have suggested that lifelong chronic and cumulative exposure to social and economic stressors is associated with early onset of chronic illness in African American women. Recent literature has demonstrated that socioeconomic aspects of neighborhoods contribute to health disparities in heart disease morbidity and mortality. In this article, the author analyzes the stories of older African American women concerning stress and other events related to heart disease, triangulated with individual- and neighborhood-level socioeconomic and environmental data, from the perspective of the weathering conceptual framework. She conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with urban, older Black women with early-stage heart disease. Women described lifelong and recent incidents of stress that they perceived as contributing to their “bad heart.” The episodes described were a mixture of chronic social, environmental, and family-related challenges. Findings reveal substantial evidence supporting the weathering conceptual framework and the Sojourner syndrome in this sample of older, chronically ill Black women.