Employment trajectories and biological aging: Racial and ethnic disparities in work instability and epigenetic age acceleration.

Authors

Wen-Hua Lai, Ting-Syuan Lin, Tsai-Chin Cho, Helen C S Meier, Farah Ammous, Amanda N Leggett

Published in

SSM - population health. Volume 36. Pages 101973. Epub Sep 23, 2026.

Abstract

Racial and ethnic inequalities in healthy aging may reflect the cumulative biological toll of structural disadvantage. Employment is one life-course pathway through which this disadvantage is reproduced, yet most research relies on point-in-time measures rather than long-term work histories. Guided by the weathering hypothesis, this study examined whether life-course employment trajectories were patterned by race and ethnicity, whether they were associated with epigenetic age acceleration (EAA), and whether racial and ethnic differences in EAA persisted within similar work histories. Using the 2016 Health and Retirement Study with the linked Life History Mail Survey and Venous Blood Study, we constructed employment histories from ages 18 to 50 and applied sequence and cluster analysis to identify four trajectories. Multinomial logistic regression showed that Black and Hispanic adults had more than twice the odds of "Late Workforce Entry" than White adults, with differences concentrated in delayed entry rather than mid-career disruption or non-employment. In survey-weighted OLS models across five epigenetic clocks (N = 1861), employment trajectory was largely unrelated to EAA and did not moderate racial and ethnic differences in it. Racial differences nonetheless persisted within trajectories: Black adults showed faster DunedinPACE and GrimAge acceleration than White adults, with DunedinPACE differences within stable full-time work and both differences within long-term non-employment, while differing in the opposite direction on the age-predictive Hannum clock. These findings partially align with the weathering hypothesis by showing that racial differences in biological aging persist even within similar employment trajectories. This pattern suggests that the biological consequences of employment may depend not only on long-term work patterns, but also on the unequal conditions and experiences embedded within them.

PMID:
42866669
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 14 Oct 2026.

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