Pamela Herd

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Public Affairs

Background Exposures to environmental toxicants and pollutants occur at various points along the life course, with mounting evidence that late‐life pollution exposure increases risk for neurological disease, including dementia. Although occupational hazards constitute a primary source of modifiable environmental exposure during the working years, t...

Increasing evidence supports a deleterious effect of late-life air pollution exposure on dementia risk that is exacerbated among older ApolipoproteinE-4 (ApoE-4) carriers. However, the protracted effects of mid-life occupational exposures on dementia outcomes, and potential interactions with ApoE, are unknown. Using prospective life course data fro...

By some estimates, each additional year of education reduces dementia risk by 7 percent. What remains unclear, however, is how early life cognitive function, which influences educational attainment, and is hypothesized to influence later life dementia risk, factors into the relationship between education and dementia risk. Existing research neither...

This session, which brings together a set of papers from participants in the Network on Education, Biosocial Pathways, and Dementia in Diverse Populations (EdDem), attends to the relationship between education and cognitive function and dementia in later life. The papers in this session explore two major themes. First, they examine the role of earl...

INTRODUCTION Late‐life air pollution exposure is associated with an increased risk for dementia, with this effect exacerbated among apolipoprotein E‐4 (ApoE‐4) carriers. However, whether midlife occupational exposures likewise influence dementia outcomes, and varies as a function of ApoE‐4 status is unknown. METHODS Using data from 3814 participan...

Gendered burdens are experiences of coercive and controlling state actions that directly regulate gendered bodies, labor, and identity. It’s not simply about preventing access to rights and benefits, it’s about control and coercion. Gendered burdens generate gender inequality through four mechanisms. First, administrative burdens regulate reproduct...

Although there is robust evidence that socioeconomic position influences later-life cognitive function, two issues limit knowledge regarding the nature and magnitude of these relationships and potential policy interventions. First, most social science research tends to treat cognition as a unitary concept despite evidence that cognitive outcomes ar...

The Child Tax Credit (CTC) expansion was an extraordinary experiment not just in policy design but also in policy implementation. As such, it cast light on the possibilities and blind spots of using the tax system to deliver safety-net benefits. The rapid and widespread take-up of the benefit reflected the use of a specific implementation tool that...

Gendered burdens are experiences of coercive and controlling state actions that directly regulate gendered bodies, labor, and identity. It’s not simply about preventing access to rights and benefits, it’s about control and coercion. Gendered burdens generate gender inequality through four mechanisms. First, administrative burdens regulate reproduct...

We revisit Arunachalam and Watson's contention that a person's physical height may be used as instrument for income because it affects economic well-being solely by causing more conservative political preferences among people who are taller. To evaluate whether other early-life and genetic factors might serve as mechanisms connecting height and pol...

Emerging research on administrative burden has highlighted the need for survey measures that capture people’s experience of government as onerous. Such indicators can connect research and practice, and fulfill government mandates to identify and reduce burdens. This study presents a measure of experienced administrative burden, based on a survey of...

Background The importance of education in shaping brain health and dementia risk are increasingly supported, although the mechanisms by which these life course factors impact late life cognition remain elusive due to a scarcity of full life‐course longitudinal studies. A new data collection wave of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), the Initia...

Background Exposure to ambient air pollution is an emerging risk factor for dementia, yet air pollution levels are found to vary by neighborhood affluence and across rural/urban settings. In this study, we leverage data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to evaluate the effects of ambient air pollution exposure on the rate of memory declin...

Educational attainment is one of the strongest predictors of Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias (ADRD). Yet, much remains unknown as to how early life factors, particularly early life cognitive function, and early life environments, such as family environments, help explain why education so robustly protects against later life dementia. Is the influ...

APOE, specifically the e4 allele, is the strongest known genetic risk factor for late-onset dementia. Individuals with at least one copy of the e4 allele have a 3-15 times higher risk for dementia, and faster rates of cognitive decline, than those without it. Although education has been shown to moderate this relationship, the quality of U.S. educa...

We examine changes in administrative burden in U.S. social safety net programs, or the negative encounters with the state that people experience when trying to access and use the benefits for which they are eligible. Existing theories equate targeted safety net policies, which sharply limit eligibility, as compared to universal policies, which have...

Background: Prior research suggests a link between menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) use, memory function, and diabetes risk. The menopausal transition is a modifiable period to enhance long-term health and cognitive outcomes, although studies have been limited by short follow-up periods precluding a solid understanding of the lasting effects of MH...

Policy Points Administrative burdens, which are the onerous experiences people have when trying to access government benefits and services, reduce older adult's access to health promoting policies. Although considerable attention has been focused on threats to the old‐age welfare state, ranging from long‐term financing problems to attempts to roll...

There is growing attention to how policymakers and bureaucrats think about administrative burdens, but we know less about public tolerance for burdens. We examine public burden tolerance in two major programmes (Medicaid and SNAP) using a representative sample of US residents. We show broad support for work requirements and weaker support for gener...

Tobacco and alcohol use are heritable behaviours associated with 15% and 5.3% of worldwide deaths, respectively, due largely to broad increased risk for disease and injury1–4. These substances are used across the globe, yet genome-wide association studies have focused largely on individuals of European ancestries⁵. Here we leveraged global genetic...

Public services represent a key means by which societies seek to reduce inequalities. However, some people may experience administrative procedures as more burdensome than others, creating inequality within programs intended to be equity‐enhancing. Prior work has found human capital (e.g., education and conditions like scarcity) to affect burden an...

Politicians engage in, and the media amplifies, social constructions of welfare recipients as undeserving. Such messaging seeks to influence mass public opinion, but what are the effects on the target population receiving welfare benefits? We test if deservingness messaging affects welfare recipients' mental health. To do so, we exploit a quasi-exp...

Black adults face a substantially higher risk for dementia in later life compared to their White peers. Given the critical role of educational attainment and cognitive function in later life dementia risk, this paper aims to determine if early educational experiences and educational attainment are differentially related to trajectories of cognitive...

The topic of administrative burden is relatively novel, but reflects people’s most common experiences of government: confusion about what is expected of them (learning costs), onerous processes (compliance costs), and associated emotions such as frustration (psychological cost). This symposium applies a behavioral perspective to the topic. We learn...

We conduct a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment (EA) in a sample of ~3 million individuals and identify 3,952 approximately uncorrelated genome-wide-significant single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A genome-wide polygenic predictor, or polygenic index (PGI), explains 12–16% of EA variance and contributes to risk predi...

This article develops the concept of racialized burdens as a means of examining the role of race in administrative practice. Racialized burdens are the experience of learning, compliance and psychological costs that serve as inequality reproducing mechanisms. To develop this concept, we examine administrative burdens in the US state from the theore...

Introduction Lead exposure negatively affects cognitive functioning among children. However, there is limited evidence about whether exposure to lead in early life impairs later life cognitive functioning. Methods Participants in the prospective Wisconsin Longitudinal Study cohort (N = 8583) were linked to the 1940 Census, which was taken when the...

A perennial task for the state is the creation and policing of categories. State-created categories have real world impacts on the public. The consequences of racial categorizations, for example, are well-documented. We examine a less studied consequence of state categorization, which are the administrative burdens created when individuals attempt...

What does a government do when it decides to make a public service as burdensome as possible? We consider this question in the context of immigration policy during the Trump administration. The case demonstrates the deliberate and governmentwide use of administrative burdens to make legal processes of immigration confusing, demanding, and stressful...

One of the distinctive strengths of WLS is the availability of Henmon-Nelson IQ scores on all participants while in high school, followed by prospective collection of data through cognitive batteries of varying size and sophistication. Launched in 1993, the initial longitudinal cognitive testing included 8 abstract reasoning items followed by the a...

Between 2021 and 2025, WLS will collect two new waves of data, which will capture detailed measures of cognitive change and dementia as the cohort reaches their early to mid 80s. In this session, I will provide an overview of the data that we’re collecting, as well as opportunities to explore early and mid-life determinants of cognitive change and...

Starting with policy changes in the 1980s, Medicare has largely become privatized, with nearly 40 percent of beneficiaries enrolled in private Medicare Advantage plans and another 30 percent with private supplemental coverage, including for prescription drug coverage. As a result, Medicare has become laden with administrative burdens and barriers....

Polygenic indexes (PGIs) are DNA-based predictors. Their value for research in many scientific disciplines is growing rapidly. As a resource for researchers, we used a consistent methodology to construct PGIs for 47 phenotypes in 11 datasets. To maximize the PGIs’ prediction accuracies, we constructed them using genome-wide association studies—some...

Background Residing in a disadvantaged neighborhood is associated with adverse health outcomes, as well as increased risk for dementia. However, it remains unclear whether area‐level deprivation impacts the rate of age‐related memory decline, especially in community‐based populations. Method We quantified late life neighborhood level disadvantage...

The particularly interdisciplinary nature of human microbiome research makes the organization and reporting of results spanning epidemiology, biology, bioinformatics, translational medicine and statistics a challenge. Commonly used reporting guidelines for observational or genetic epidemiology studies lack key features specific to microbiome studie...

As the population ages and the prevalence of dementia increases, unpacking robust and persistent associations between educational attainment and later life cognitive functioning is increasingly important. We do know, from studies with robust causal designs, that policies that increase years of schooling improve later life cognitive functioning. Yet...

Over the last 30 years, private health insurers have become entrenched in the Medicare program. As of 2020, nearly 40% of beneficiaries were exclusively in private health insurance, via their participation in Medicare Advantage, with estimates that this could reach 47% by 2029 (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2019; Terry & Muhlestein, 2021). Among the re...

Background: There is a robust consensus, most recently articulated in the 2020 Lancet Commission, that the roots of dementia can be traced to early life, and that the path to prevention may start there as well. Indeed, a growing body of research demonstrates that early life disadvantage may influence the risk for later life dementia and cognitive...

We detail the implications of sociogenomics for social determinants research. We focus on education and race because of how early twentieth-century scientific eugenic thinking facilitated a range of racist and eugenic policies, most of which helped justify and pattern racial and educational morbidity and mortality disparities that remain today, and...

Polygenic indexes (PGIs) are DNA-based predictors. Their value for research in many scientific disciplines is rapidly growing. As a resource for researchers, we used a consistent methodology to construct PGIs for 47 phenotypes in 11 datasets. To maximize the PGIs' prediction accuracies, we constructed them using genome-wide association studies - so...

Background: There is growing consensus that non-genetic determinants of dementia can be linked to various risk- and resiliency-enhancing factors accumulating throughout the lifespan, including socioeconomic conditions, early life experiences, educational attainment, lifestyle behaviors, and physical/mental health. Yet, the causal impact of these d...

Low muscle strength is an important heritable indicator of poor health linked to morbidity and mortality in older people. In a genome-wide association study meta-analysis of 256,523 Europeans aged 60 years and over from 22 cohorts we identify 15 loci associated with muscle weakness (European Working Group on Sarcopenia in Older People definition: n...

Animal studies have shown that the gut microbiome can influence memory, social behavior, and anxiety-like behavior. Several human studies show similar results where variation in the gut microbiome is associated with dementia, depression, and personality traits, though most of these studies are limited by small sample size and other biases. Here, we...

Although educational attainment is one of the strongest correlates of mass political participation, researchers disagree about whether it has a causal impact on voter turnout. One prominent theory proposes the observed correlation between higher educational attainment and political participation is spurious, largely reflecting early-life factors su...

Low muscle strength is an important heritable indicator of poor health linked to morbidity and mortality in older people. In a genome-wide association study meta-analysis of 256,523 Europeans aged 60 years and over from 22 cohorts we identified 15 loci associated with muscle weakness (European Working Group on Sarcopenia in Older People definition:...

The US healthcare system is enormously complex, begetting a seemingly endless array of bureaucratic obstacles that make it both costly and difficult to navigate for users. We apply the administrative burden framework to three particular aspects of health policy: the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Medicaid, and Medicare. The applications are more illust...

The idea that trillions of bacteria inhabit our gut is somewhat unnerving, yet these bacteria may have a greater influence on our behavior than previously thought. Accumulating data strongly suggest that these gut commensal organisms have a strong inter-relationship with our brain and behavior, including cognitive function, mood, and personality. I...

One means by which the state reinforces inequality is by imposing administrative burdens that loom larger for citizens with lower levels of human capital. Integrating insights from various disciplines, this article focuses on one aspect of human capital: cognitive resources. The authors outline a model that explains how burdens and cognitive resour...

Women’s opportunities have been profoundly altered over the past century by reductions in the social and structural constraints that limit women’s educational attainment. Do social constraints manifest as a suppressing influence on genetic indicators of potential, and if so, did equalizing opportunity mean equalizing the role of genetics? We addres...

There is growing interest in rural disadvantage and the implications for health and well-being in later life. We examine the relationship between living in rural areas in childhood and cognitive outcomes later in life using the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. The WLS has prospective childhood measures of geographic status, adolescent IQ, and detailed...

The human microbiome represents a new frontier in understanding the biology of human health. While epidemiology in this area is still in its infancy, its scope will likely expand dramatically over the coming years. To rise to the challenge, we argue that epidemiology should capitalize on its population perspective as a critical complement to molecu...

Dunkel et al. (2019) observe higher MTAG polygenic scores for educational attainment among the 53 Jewish respondents with available genomic data in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. They interpret their ensuing analysis as evidence that genetic differences "mediate" the association between being Jewish and higher cognitive test scores and higher ed...

Social relationships shape human health and mortality via behavioral, psychosocial, and physiological mechanisms, including inflammatory and immune responses. Though not tested in human studies, recent primate studies indicate that the gut microbiome may also be a biological mechanism linking relationships to health. Integrating microbiota data int...

The microbiome is now considered our ‘second genome’ with potentially comparable importance to the genome in determining human health. There is, however, a relatively limited understanding of the broader environmental factors, particularly social conditions, that shape variation in human microbial communities. Fulfilling the promise of microbiome r...

Social relationships shape human health and mortality via behavioral, psychosocial, and physiological mechanisms, including inflammatory and immune responses. Though not tested in human studies, recent primate studies indicate that the gut microbiome may also be a biological mechanism linking relationships to health. Integrating microbiota data int...

Here we conducted a large-scale genetic association analysis of educational attainment in a sample of approximately 1.1 million individuals and identify 1,271 independent genome-wide-significant SNPs. For the SNPs taken together, we found evidence of heterogeneous effects across environments. The SNPs implicate genes involved in brain-development p...

Significance Genome-wide association study (GWAS) discoveries about educational attainment have raised questions about the meaning of the genetics of success. These discoveries could offer clues about biological mechanisms or, because children inherit genetics and social class from parents, education-linked genetics could be spurious correlates of...

Background: Convenient, reproducible, and rapid preservation of unique biological specimens is pivotal to their use in microbiome analyses. As an increasing number of human studies incorporate the gut microbiome in their design, there is a high demand for streamlined sample collection and storage methods that are amenable to different settings and...

We undertook a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of parental longevity in European descent UK Biobank participants. For combined mothers' and fathers' attained age, 10 loci were associated (p<5*10-8), including 8 previously identified for traits including survival, Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease. Of these, 4 were also associated with lon...

This study examined the Big Five personality traits as predictors of mortality risk, and smoking as a mediator of that association. Replication was built into the fabric of our design: we used a Coordinated Analysis with 15 international datasets, representing 44,094 participants. We found that high neuroticism and low conscientiousness, extraversi...

This study examined the Big Five personality traits as predictors of mortality risk, and smoking as a mediator of that association. Replication was built into the fabric of our design: we used a Coordinated Analysis with 15 international datasets, representing 44,094 participants. We found that high neuroticism and low conscientiousness, extraversi...

Objective: To test the feasibility of collecting and integrating data on the gut microbiome into one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies of aging and health, the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS). The long-term goal of this integration is to clarify the contribution of social conditions in shaping the composition of the gut microbiota...

Objectives This study examined how environmental, health, social, behavioural and genetic factors interact to contribute to myocardial infarction (MI) risk. Design Survey data collected by Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), USA, from 1957 to 2011, including 235 environmental, health, social and behavioural factors, and 77 single- nucleotide polym...

Physical and mental health is known to have wide influence over most aspects of social life-be it schooling and employment or marriage and broader social engagement-but it has received limited attention in explaining different forms of political participation. We analyze a unique data set with a rich array of objective measures of cognitive and phy...

Despite decades of research on unintended pregnancies, we know little about the health implications for the women who experience them. Moreover, no study has examined the implications for women whose pregnancies occurred before Roe v. Wade was decided-nor whether the mental health consequences of these unintended pregnancies continue into later lif...

This article offers two theoretical contributions. First, we develop the concept of administrative burden as an important variable in understanding how citizens experience the state. Administrative burden is conceptualized as a function of learning, psychological, and compliance costs that citizens experience in their interactions with government....

Policy debates about raising the full retirement age often neglect socioeconomic health disparities among U.S. workers. In response to this gap, we analyzed educational differentials in health among middle-age and older adults and translated the findings into age equivalents.Method.We used the nationally representative 1997-2010 National Health Int...

The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) is a longitudinal study of men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957 and one of their randomly selected siblings. Wisconsin is located in the upper midwest of the United States and had a population of approximately 14 000 000 in 1957, making it the 14th most populous state at that time. D...

While politicians wage legislative battles about welfare benefits, bureaucratic procedures represent a less visible means to shape access to those benefits. By constructing complex and time-consuming application procedures, the state can effectively create administrative barriers that limit access to benefits. What explains the variation in the lev...

Administrative burden is an individual's experience of policy implementation as onerous. Such burdens may be created because of a desire to limit payments to ineligible claimants, but they also serve to limit take-up of benefits by eligible claimants. For citizens, this burden may occur through learning about a program; complying with rules and dis...

Objectives: We examined depression within a multidimensional framework consisting of genetic, environmental, and sociobehavioral factors and, using machine learning algorithms, explored interactions among these factors that might better explain the etiology of depressive symptoms. Methods: We measured current depressive symptoms using the Center...

Healthcare providers often share difficult or life-altering news with their patients yet this challenging and delicate process is frequently met with dissatisfaction by those receiving this news. Articles and guidelines exist to aid providers in sharing diagnoses such as Down syndrome, but relatively few have focused on rare genetic conditions ofte...

Background Educational attainment is highly correlated with social inequalities in adult cognitive health; however, the nature of this correlation is in dispute. Recently, researchers have argued that educational inequalities are an artefact of selection by individual differences in prior cognitive ability, which both drives educational attainment...