Arline Geronimus wrote about the weathering hypothesis the early 1990s to account for health disparities of newborn babies and birth mothers due to decades and generations of racism and social, economic, and political oppression.
[1] This is due to multiple stressors including prejudice, social alienation, institutional bias, political oppression, economic exclusion, and racial discrimination.
[4] The weathering hypothesis is more widely accepted as a framework for explaining health disparities on the basis of differential exposure to racially based stressors.
[6][7][8][9] The weathering hypothesis was initially formulated by Arline Geronimus to explain the dire maternal health and birth outcomes of African American women that she observed in correspondence with increased age.
She proposed that the accumulation of cultural, social and economic disadvantages may lead to earlier deterioration of health among African American women compared to their non-Hispanic, white counterparts.
Subsequently, Geronimus proposed the "weathering hypothesis", which she initially conceived as a potential explanation for the patterns of racial variation in infant mortality with increasing maternal age.
[3] These stressors—and the associated burden of coping with them—manifest as physiological responses that have detrimental effects on individual health, often leading to a disproportionately high occurrence of chronic illness and shorter life expectancy in minority communities.
[16] There is modest evidence supporting the effects of weathering on mothers from other minority groups, including for high birth weight outcomes among American Indian/Alaska Native women.
[19] Research has started to explore whether the weathering hypothesis could also explain racial disparities in the outcomes of assisted reproductive technologies, but so far the findings are inconsistent.
[28] These higher rates of Alzheimer's disease might be due to the impact of more negative and pronounced social determinants of health,[29][30] including racial discrimination,[31][32] that might accelerate brain aging disproportionately in Black Americans.
[38] Others pushed back against the weathering hypothesis because its application to racial disparities in maternal health seemed to contradict what advocacy groups had been saying about the negative consequences of teen pregnancy on young mothers.
[41] Researchers have also been interested in studying the possibility of children inheriting the epigenetic changes which result from their mother's cumulative life stress, which could relate the weathering hypothesis with transgenerational trauma.