Chronic family turmoil and other problems cause physic...( ands get under the skin and into the bo...),Health

In some studies, he noted, high allostatic loads are correlated with a greater incidence of physical, mental and cognitive disorders. The new data, Evans said, may therefore explain, at least in part, "why income and racial inequalities are so pervasive and persistent in our society. Low-income kids and especially low-income kids who are nonwhite bear a disproportionate burden of cumulative risk exposure."

The researchers also found that when stressed by a mental arithmetic problem, the cardiovascular systems of adolescents who had been exposed to chronic risk factors responded less actively to the stressor and were slower to physiologically recover.

The results are based on surveys, blood pressure measurements and urine samples from 207 seventh- and eighth-grade children in rural upstate New York who had participated in a first wave of the study while they were in elementary school.

"We oversampled low-income children given our interest in risk and poverty," said Evans. He said they chose a rural, white community "given that the majority of children in America who are poor are white and that rural poverty constitutes greater and more persistent material deprivation than urban poverty."