Eric T Klopack
Biographic Data
| ID | 762759 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric T Klopack |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric T |
| FAMILY NAME | Klopack |
| SIGNATURE | KLOPACK E T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0019-1332 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 91 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Remarkable concordance in associations between epigenetic clocks and health behaviors across three countries
Short Sleep and Insomnia Are Associated With Accelerated Epigenetic Age
OBJECTIVE: Short sleep and insomnia are each associated with a greater risk of age-related disease, which suggests that insufficient sleep may accelerate biological aging. We examine whether short sleep and insomnia alone or together relates to epigenetic age among older adults. METHODS: A total of 3795 men (46.3%) and women aged 56 to 100 years from the Health and Retirement Study were included. Insomnia was defined as reporting at least one ins…
The embodiment of parental death in early life through accelerated epigenetic aging
Parental death in early life has been linked to various adverse health outcomes in older adulthood. This study extends prior research to evaluate how parental death in early life is tied to accelerated epigenetic aging, a potentially important biological mechanism from which social and environmental exposures impact age-related health. We used data from the 2016 Venous Blood Study (VBS), a component of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), to ex…
Epigenetic Aging Helps Explain Differential Resilience in Older Adults
Past research suggests that resilience to health hazards increases with age, potentially because less resilient individuals die at earlier ages, leaving behind their more resilient peers. Using lifetime cigarette smoking as a model health hazard, we examined whether accelerated epigenetic aging (indicating differences in the speed of individuals’ underlying aging process) helps explain age-related resilience in a nationally representative sample …
Parental Divorce in Childhood and the Accelerated Epigenetic Aging for Earlier and Later Cohorts
We examine effects of parental divorce on epigenetic aging in later adulthood for two birth cohorts: one born in the early 20th century and the other born in the later 20th century. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (n = 1,545), we examine the relationship between parental divorce in childhood and accelerated epigenetic aging in older adulthood as indicated by the Dunedin methylation Pace of Aging score. We assess how this relations…
Chronic Stress and Latent Virus Reactivation
These findings suggest that immune aging is a biological pathway underlying the stress process and help explain past findings in the literature on stress and health
Midlife financial strain and later‐life health and wellbeing of husbands and wives
This study investigates (a) heterogeneous trajectories of couple intimacy over the mid‐later years (average ages of 40–65) and (b) how these intimacy classes are differentially associated with spouses’ midlife financial strain as well as their later‐life health and wellbeing outcomes. The sample was comprised of white couples in long‐term marriages from the rural Mid‐west who experienced the economic downturn of the farm crisis in late 1980s. Cou…
Accelerated epigenetic aging mediates link between adverse childhood experiences and depressive symptoms in older adults
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) increase risk for depression at subsequent ages and have been linked to accelerated biological aging. We hypothesize that accelerated epigenetic aging may partially mediate the link between ACEs and depression. This study examines 3 three second-generation epigenetic aging measures (viz., GrimAge, PhenoAge, and DunedinPoAm38) as mediators of the link between ACEs and depressive symptoms in older adulthood. We …
School Disengagement Predicts Accelerated Aging among Black American Youth
Early experiences of school disengagement may serve as a warning sign for later young adult adjustment difficulties and eventually contribute to accelerated aging among Black American youth. At the same time, supportive parenting may play a protective role. Using longitudinal data from the Family and Community Health Study (FACHS), we examined psychological maladjustment (comprising depression, lack of self-regulation, and low self-esteem) as a m…
Do Loneliness and Per Capita Income Combine to Increase the Pace of Biological Aging for Black Adults across Late Middle Age
In a sample of 685 late middle-aged Black adults (M age at 2019 = 57.17 years), we examined the effects of loneliness and per capita income on accelerated aging using a newly developed DNA-methylation based index: the DunedinPACE. First, using linear, mixed effects regression in a growth curve framework, we found that change in DunedinPACE was dependent on age, with a linear model best fitting the data (b = 0.004, p p p < 0.001) were significantl…
Socioeconomic status and immune aging in older US adults in the health and retirement study
Socioeconomic and demographic factors including educational attainment, race and ethnicity, and childhood socioeconomic status (SES) are powerful predictors of inequalities in aging, morbidity, and mortality. Immune aging, including accumulation of late-differentiated, senescent-like lymphocytes and lower levels of naïve lymphocytes, may play a role in the development of the age-related health inequalities. This study used nationally representati…
Patterns of Co-occurring Developmental Failures in Adolescence
9,107; mean age = 15.5 years; Female = 52.9 per cent) were used to identify classes of early socioeconomic adversity and conjoint trajectory groups of co-occurring developmental problems. Profiles of social antecedents, genetic endowments (polygenic scores), and physical health outcomes in young adulthood were compared across identified four conjoint trajectory risk groups (overall high-risk, overall low-risk, BMI-risk or obesity, low education-r…
Shifts in lifestyle and socioeconomic circumstances predict change-for better or worse-in speed of epigenetic aging
Stressful family contexts and health in divorced and married mothers
Past research suggests that social, psychological and biological processes underlying common health problems are highly interrelated and may be comonents of a larger biopsychosocial process. This process may be influenced by marital status. The current study investigated a biopsychosocial process involving social, psychological and physcial health problems over the second half of the life course, comparing women who were mothers with different ma…
Conjoint trajectories of couples' marital and parental conflictual behaviors and later-life mental, physical, and relational health
Conflictual marital and parental relationships mutually reinforce each other generating family-level stress. The cumulative experiences of stressful family conflictual circumstances (a family-level construct of family conflictual circumstances (FCC), based on marital and parental conflictual behaviors) affect a couple's well-being. The present study, utilizing longitudinal data of 370 couples in enduring marriages and a person-centered approach, …
Racial Discrimination, Inflammation, and Chronic Illness Among African American Women at Midlife
Unstable Childhood, Adult Adversity, and Smoking Accelerate Biological Aging Among Middle-Age African Americans
Objectives: The recent biological clocks GrimAge and PoAm are robust predictors of morbidity and mortality. Little research, however, has investigated the factors that influence their ticking speed. No study has used multivariate analyses to examine whether childhood adversity, adult hardship, lifestyle practices, or some combination of these factors best explains acceleration of these indices. Methods: Using a sample of 506 middle-age African Am…
The effects of social adversity, discrimination, and health risk behaviors on the accelerated aging of African Americans
(Re)Setting Epigenetic Clocks
Research on biological embedding of the social environment has been expedited by increased availability of biomarkers. Recently, this arsenal of measures has been expanded to include epigenetic clocks that indicate in years the extent to which an individual is older or younger than their chronological age. These measures of biological aging, especially GrimAge, are robust predictors of both illness and time to death. Importantly for sociologists,…
Sibling relationships in older adulthood
4.58) on average. Participants provided self-report data about their relationships and well-being. Results showed that older adults reported high levels of sibling warmth and low levels of sibling conflict and parental favoritism. Sister-sister pairs had warmer sibling relationships than other gender-compositions. Sibling conflict and parental favoritism were positively associated with symptoms of depression, anxiety, hostility, and loneliness. S…
Social and psychological consequences of the Covid-19 outbreak
This article discusses the value of studying past social and psychological responses to pandemics and natural disasters in understanding reactions to coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19). By examining severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) experiences in both Taiwan and Hong Kong, we indicate that psychological trauma might be a pathway whereby the COVID-19 outbreak affects long-term health and well-being and that psychological and collective…
How Midlife Chronic Stress Combines with Stressful Life Events to Influence Later Life Mental and Physical Health for Husbands and Wives in Enduring Marriages
Objectives: To investigate how midlife chronic stress (40-50 years) and subsequent acute stressful events (50-65 years) influence husbands' and wives' later life mental and physical health (65+ years). Methods: Dyadic structural equation modeling was used with prospective data over 25 years from 256 husbands and wives in enduring marriages. Results: For both spouses, midlife chronic stress influenced the occurrence of subsequent acute stressful l…
Disentangling the Effects of Boys’ Pubertal Timing
Patterning of midlife marital trajectories in enduring marriages in a dyadic context
The current study, using prospective data over 25 years (1991-2015; N = 245 couples), investigates life course dyadic patterns of positive and negative marital trajectories (i.e., marital strength and strain, respectively) in middle-aged husbands and wives and an array of physical and mental health outcomes associated with these patterns. Spousal warmth, spouse's constructive conflict resolution, and couple's joint participation were used as indi…
Couple-Level Stress Proliferation and Husbands' and Wives' Distress During the Life Course
ObjectiveThe present study investigated the factorial structure of the dyadic stress proliferation process in couples in enduring marriages leading to their psychological distress in later years.BackgroundStress proliferation during short and long periods of time has been shown to drive complex stress-distress processes during the life course. This research has largely been limited to individual-level stress proliferation with less research demon…
The effects of social adversity, discrimination, and health risk behaviors on the accelerated aging of African Americans
Patterning of midlife marital trajectories in enduring marriages in a dyadic context
The current study, using prospective data over 25 years (1991-2015; N = 245 couples), investigates life course dyadic patterns of positive and negative marital trajectories (i.e., marital strength and strain, respectively) in middle-aged husbands and wives and an array of physical and mental health outcomes associated with these patterns. Spousal warmth, spouse's constructive conflict resolution, and couple's joint participation were used as indi…
Shifts in lifestyle and socioeconomic circumstances predict change-for better or worse-in speed of epigenetic aging
Racial Discrimination as a Risk Factor for African American Men’s Physical Partner Violence
Although researchers have explored negative individual consequences of racial discrimination, very little work has examined the connection between discrimination and intimate partner violence (IPV) among African American men. Existing work tends to be cross-sectional and does not specify mediators or moderators that might explain this link. Thus, in the current study, we use longitudinal, prospective data from 200 young men to examine potential m…
(Re)Setting Epigenetic Clocks
Research on biological embedding of the social environment has been expedited by increased availability of biomarkers. Recently, this arsenal of measures has been expanded to include epigenetic clocks that indicate in years the extent to which an individual is older or younger than their chronological age. These measures of biological aging, especially GrimAge, are robust predictors of both illness and time to death. Importantly for sociologists,…
Disentangling the Effects of Boys’ Pubertal Timing
Couple-Level Stress Proliferation and Husbands' and Wives' Distress During the Life Course
ObjectiveThe present study investigated the factorial structure of the dyadic stress proliferation process in couples in enduring marriages leading to their psychological distress in later years.BackgroundStress proliferation during short and long periods of time has been shown to drive complex stress-distress processes during the life course. This research has largely been limited to individual-level stress proliferation with less research demon…
Life Course Patterns of Concurrent Trajectories of BMI and Affective Symptoms of Rural Mothers
The identification of members of various conjoint risk trajectory groups provides a potentially useful prognostic tool for early preventive intervention efforts, treatment, and policy formation. Such interventions should promote and develop resiliency factors, thereby aiding in the redirection of middle-aged women's adverse risk trajectories
Chronic Stress and Latent Virus Reactivation
These findings suggest that immune aging is a biological pathway underlying the stress process and help explain past findings in the literature on stress and health
Conjoint trajectories of couples' marital and parental conflictual behaviors and later-life mental, physical, and relational health
Conflictual marital and parental relationships mutually reinforce each other generating family-level stress. The cumulative experiences of stressful family conflictual circumstances (a family-level construct of family conflictual circumstances (FCC), based on marital and parental conflictual behaviors) affect a couple's well-being. The present study, utilizing longitudinal data of 370 couples in enduring marriages and a person-centered approach, …
Unstable Childhood, Adult Adversity, and Smoking Accelerate Biological Aging Among Middle-Age African Americans
Objectives: The recent biological clocks GrimAge and PoAm are robust predictors of morbidity and mortality. Little research, however, has investigated the factors that influence their ticking speed. No study has used multivariate analyses to examine whether childhood adversity, adult hardship, lifestyle practices, or some combination of these factors best explains acceleration of these indices. Methods: Using a sample of 506 middle-age African Am…
Socioeconomic status and immune aging in older US adults in the health and retirement study
Socioeconomic and demographic factors including educational attainment, race and ethnicity, and childhood socioeconomic status (SES) are powerful predictors of inequalities in aging, morbidity, and mortality. Immune aging, including accumulation of late-differentiated, senescent-like lymphocytes and lower levels of naïve lymphocytes, may play a role in the development of the age-related health inequalities. This study used nationally representati…
Stressful family contexts and health in divorced and married mothers
Past research suggests that social, psychological and biological processes underlying common health problems are highly interrelated and may be comonents of a larger biopsychosocial process. This process may be influenced by marital status. The current study investigated a biopsychosocial process involving social, psychological and physcial health problems over the second half of the life course, comparing women who were mothers with different ma…
How Midlife Chronic Stress Combines with Stressful Life Events to Influence Later Life Mental and Physical Health for Husbands and Wives in Enduring Marriages
Objectives: To investigate how midlife chronic stress (40-50 years) and subsequent acute stressful events (50-65 years) influence husbands' and wives' later life mental and physical health (65+ years). Methods: Dyadic structural equation modeling was used with prospective data over 25 years from 256 husbands and wives in enduring marriages. Results: For both spouses, midlife chronic stress influenced the occurrence of subsequent acute stressful l…
Invited Address
Invited Address
Life Course Patterns of Concurrent Trajectories of BMI and Affective Symptoms of Rural Mothers
The identification of members of various conjoint risk trajectory groups provides a potentially useful prognostic tool for early preventive intervention efforts, treatment, and policy formation. Such interventions should promote and develop resiliency factors, thereby aiding in the redirection of middle-aged women's adverse risk trajectories
Racial Discrimination as a Risk Factor for African American Men’s Physical Partner Violence
Although researchers have explored negative individual consequences of racial discrimination, very little work has examined the connection between discrimination and intimate partner violence (IPV) among African American men. Existing work tends to be cross-sectional and does not specify mediators or moderators that might explain this link. Thus, in the current study, we use longitudinal, prospective data from 200 young men to examine potential m…
Sibling relationships in older adulthood
4.58) on average. Participants provided self-report data about their relationships and well-being. Results showed that older adults reported high levels of sibling warmth and low levels of sibling conflict and parental favoritism. Sister-sister pairs had warmer sibling relationships than other gender-compositions. Sibling conflict and parental favoritism were positively associated with symptoms of depression, anxiety, hostility, and loneliness. S…
Social and psychological consequences of the Covid-19 outbreak
This article discusses the value of studying past social and psychological responses to pandemics and natural disasters in understanding reactions to coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19). By examining severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) experiences in both Taiwan and Hong Kong, we indicate that psychological trauma might be a pathway whereby the COVID-19 outbreak affects long-term health and well-being and that psychological and collective…
How Midlife Chronic Stress Combines with Stressful Life Events to Influence Later Life Mental and Physical Health for Husbands and Wives in Enduring Marriages
Objectives: To investigate how midlife chronic stress (40-50 years) and subsequent acute stressful events (50-65 years) influence husbands' and wives' later life mental and physical health (65+ years). Methods: Dyadic structural equation modeling was used with prospective data over 25 years from 256 husbands and wives in enduring marriages. Results: For both spouses, midlife chronic stress influenced the occurrence of subsequent acute stressful l…
Disentangling the Effects of Boys’ Pubertal Timing
Patterning of midlife marital trajectories in enduring marriages in a dyadic context
The current study, using prospective data over 25 years (1991-2015; N = 245 couples), investigates life course dyadic patterns of positive and negative marital trajectories (i.e., marital strength and strain, respectively) in middle-aged husbands and wives and an array of physical and mental health outcomes associated with these patterns. Spousal warmth, spouse's constructive conflict resolution, and couple's joint participation were used as indi…
Couple-Level Stress Proliferation and Husbands' and Wives' Distress During the Life Course
ObjectiveThe present study investigated the factorial structure of the dyadic stress proliferation process in couples in enduring marriages leading to their psychological distress in later years.BackgroundStress proliferation during short and long periods of time has been shown to drive complex stress-distress processes during the life course. This research has largely been limited to individual-level stress proliferation with less research demon…
Racial Discrimination, Inflammation, and Chronic Illness Among African American Women at Midlife
Unstable Childhood, Adult Adversity, and Smoking Accelerate Biological Aging Among Middle-Age African Americans
Objectives: The recent biological clocks GrimAge and PoAm are robust predictors of morbidity and mortality. Little research, however, has investigated the factors that influence their ticking speed. No study has used multivariate analyses to examine whether childhood adversity, adult hardship, lifestyle practices, or some combination of these factors best explains acceleration of these indices. Methods: Using a sample of 506 middle-age African Am…
The effects of social adversity, discrimination, and health risk behaviors on the accelerated aging of African Americans
(Re)Setting Epigenetic Clocks
Research on biological embedding of the social environment has been expedited by increased availability of biomarkers. Recently, this arsenal of measures has been expanded to include epigenetic clocks that indicate in years the extent to which an individual is older or younger than their chronological age. These measures of biological aging, especially GrimAge, are robust predictors of both illness and time to death. Importantly for sociologists,…
Midlife financial strain and later‐life health and wellbeing of husbands and wives
This study investigates (a) heterogeneous trajectories of couple intimacy over the mid‐later years (average ages of 40–65) and (b) how these intimacy classes are differentially associated with spouses’ midlife financial strain as well as their later‐life health and wellbeing outcomes. The sample was comprised of white couples in long‐term marriages from the rural Mid‐west who experienced the economic downturn of the farm crisis in late 1980s. Cou…
Accelerated epigenetic aging mediates link between adverse childhood experiences and depressive symptoms in older adults
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) increase risk for depression at subsequent ages and have been linked to accelerated biological aging. We hypothesize that accelerated epigenetic aging may partially mediate the link between ACEs and depression. This study examines 3 three second-generation epigenetic aging measures (viz., GrimAge, PhenoAge, and DunedinPoAm38) as mediators of the link between ACEs and depressive symptoms in older adulthood. We …
School Disengagement Predicts Accelerated Aging among Black American Youth
Early experiences of school disengagement may serve as a warning sign for later young adult adjustment difficulties and eventually contribute to accelerated aging among Black American youth. At the same time, supportive parenting may play a protective role. Using longitudinal data from the Family and Community Health Study (FACHS), we examined psychological maladjustment (comprising depression, lack of self-regulation, and low self-esteem) as a m…
Do Loneliness and Per Capita Income Combine to Increase the Pace of Biological Aging for Black Adults across Late Middle Age
In a sample of 685 late middle-aged Black adults (M age at 2019 = 57.17 years), we examined the effects of loneliness and per capita income on accelerated aging using a newly developed DNA-methylation based index: the DunedinPACE. First, using linear, mixed effects regression in a growth curve framework, we found that change in DunedinPACE was dependent on age, with a linear model best fitting the data (b = 0.004, p p p < 0.001) were significantl…
Socioeconomic status and immune aging in older US adults in the health and retirement study
Socioeconomic and demographic factors including educational attainment, race and ethnicity, and childhood socioeconomic status (SES) are powerful predictors of inequalities in aging, morbidity, and mortality. Immune aging, including accumulation of late-differentiated, senescent-like lymphocytes and lower levels of naïve lymphocytes, may play a role in the development of the age-related health inequalities. This study used nationally representati…
Patterns of Co-occurring Developmental Failures in Adolescence
9,107; mean age = 15.5 years; Female = 52.9 per cent) were used to identify classes of early socioeconomic adversity and conjoint trajectory groups of co-occurring developmental problems. Profiles of social antecedents, genetic endowments (polygenic scores), and physical health outcomes in young adulthood were compared across identified four conjoint trajectory risk groups (overall high-risk, overall low-risk, BMI-risk or obesity, low education-r…
Shifts in lifestyle and socioeconomic circumstances predict change-for better or worse-in speed of epigenetic aging
Stressful family contexts and health in divorced and married mothers
Past research suggests that social, psychological and biological processes underlying common health problems are highly interrelated and may be comonents of a larger biopsychosocial process. This process may be influenced by marital status. The current study investigated a biopsychosocial process involving social, psychological and physcial health problems over the second half of the life course, comparing women who were mothers with different ma…
Conjoint trajectories of couples' marital and parental conflictual behaviors and later-life mental, physical, and relational health
Conflictual marital and parental relationships mutually reinforce each other generating family-level stress. The cumulative experiences of stressful family conflictual circumstances (a family-level construct of family conflictual circumstances (FCC), based on marital and parental conflictual behaviors) affect a couple's well-being. The present study, utilizing longitudinal data of 370 couples in enduring marriages and a person-centered approach, …
Parental Divorce in Childhood and the Accelerated Epigenetic Aging for Earlier and Later Cohorts
We examine effects of parental divorce on epigenetic aging in later adulthood for two birth cohorts: one born in the early 20th century and the other born in the later 20th century. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (n = 1,545), we examine the relationship between parental divorce in childhood and accelerated epigenetic aging in older adulthood as indicated by the Dunedin methylation Pace of Aging score. We assess how this relations…
Chronic Stress and Latent Virus Reactivation
These findings suggest that immune aging is a biological pathway underlying the stress process and help explain past findings in the literature on stress and health
Short Sleep and Insomnia Are Associated With Accelerated Epigenetic Age
OBJECTIVE: Short sleep and insomnia are each associated with a greater risk of age-related disease, which suggests that insufficient sleep may accelerate biological aging. We examine whether short sleep and insomnia alone or together relates to epigenetic age among older adults. METHODS: A total of 3795 men (46.3%) and women aged 56 to 100 years from the Health and Retirement Study were included. Insomnia was defined as reporting at least one ins…
Psychology (25 works) · Medicine (23 works) · Developmental psychology (16 works) · Gerontology (16 works) · Demography (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Clinical Psychology (10 works) · Health disparities and outcomes (10 works) · Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving (10 works) · Psychiatry (10 works)