Biosociology (2015)

I spent a year learning from and then doing research for Professor Aniruddha Das (McGill sociology) on the social foundations of health over the life course. The fields of biosociology and sociobiology are powerful, interesting, and highly underdeveloped. Insights are drawn from across the behavioural sciences to study the commonalities, differences, and relations between the physiological and mental well-being of different populations. Bypassing the nature vs nurture debate, gene*environment interactions are understood to be the basis of behaviour and the field is informed by tools ranging from hormone research to animal studies, though the longitudinal survey with biomeasures provides most sociologists with their empirical foundations. I explored the epidemiology of "behavioural addictions" and provided information for Professor Das on two projects:

1. Dyadic Concordance of Health Behaviours

After being in a relationship with someone for your entire life, it turns out that your health behaviours become similar. We wanted to explore how health status converges in late life for couples. Maybe one day I will build an agent-based model of this.

2. Metabolic Syndrome (MeTS) Measurement

This one will be hard to romanticize. The Metabolic Syndrome (MS, MES, MetS, syndrome X, MetSyn, cardiometabolic syndrome, insulin resistance syndrome, Reaven’s syndrome,...) refers to several physiological, biochemical, clinical, and metabolic factors interacting in an individual to produce a state of chronic low-grade inflammation which modulates and results in atherosclerotic processes to directly increase risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), type 2 diabetes (T2D), and all-cause mortality. Elucidation of MetS’ pathophysiology has resulted in recent efforts to unify the construct of MetS to help overcome inconsistent epidemiological studies. However, examining MeTS may not be as important as measuring its individual components alone and may share overlap with other metrics of health risk which require untangling. I looked at current consensus and debate over how the metabolic syndrome is measured, how MetS is related to other constructs of health risk, and what is known from population studies of MetS and related constructs.