Have you always been discriminated against as an LGBTQ+ person? Has it been so bad, and the stress so heavy, you literally feel it in your bones? Well, it turns out that's exactly what happens: discrimination damages the body and brain.
That's the conclusion of a new study by researchers at Université de Montréal, who found that discrimination against sexually and gender-diverse people leaves measurable biological traces in the body — so much so, it should be considered a chronic health burden.
Published in Psychoneuroendocrinology, the study was done on 357 Montreal adults aged 18 to 79: they included 129 cisgender sexual minority men and women, 96 transgender and non-binary people, and 72 cisgender heterosexual men and women.
Measuring allostatic load
In the UdeM Centre for Studies on Sex*Gender, Allostasis, and Resilience, run by psychiatry professor Robert-Paul Juster, researchers measured the participants' allostatic load, the cumulative biological wear-and-tear associated with chronic stress.
To do so, they looked at 16 biomarkers affecting the subjects' cardiovascular, metabolic, neuroendocrine and immune systems.
Divided into seven subgroups based on their gender identity and sexual orientation, the participants also completed questionnaires about their experiences of discrimination and their health behaviours.
"Our results show that, after controlling for age, major life experiences of discrimination and daily microaggressions were positively associated with allostatic load," said Nevena Chuntova, the study's lead author.
"This means that these two types of discriminatory events independently contribute to physiological dysregulation, creating a cumulative health burden and accelerated aging," said Chuntova, a doctoral student in psychology at UdeM.
