Recent studies have provided important insight into how immune system responses mediate the effects of social adversity and age on chronic illness. Simons et al.’s (2017) ITACT Ratio is a novel assessment of immune functioning that helps expand the toolkit of health psychology. Not only is this study noteworthy in showing how socioeconomic disadvantage may influence immune cell profile, but also it may prompt future work in other domains to use this new index of inflammatory dominance, the ITACT Ratio. This demonstration that social adversity gets “under the skin” through the immune system has much potential for expansion: combining ITACT with other common markers for stress and inflammation, including additional measurements for perceived stress, and expanding the investigation of the link between ITACT and chronic disease in additional populations. Results of future studies will determine if ITACT will emerge as an important new biomarker tying inflammatory dominance to chronic disease.
Keywords: Biomarker; Chronic disease; Health disparity; Immune system; Inflammation; SES; Social adversity; Women.