Dr. Cleopatra Abdou

Aging Before Birth and Beyond

With her award-winning research on pregnancy and health across generations, Cleopatra Abdou is one of the USC Davis School's rising stars
By Jonathan Riggs

The USC Davis School of Gerontology’s first-year assistant professor Cleopatra Abdou continues to impress colleagues and students both on campus and on a worldwide stage.

In the fall, she was invited to speak at the EPS Global Pediatrics summit in Nanjing, China, where she discussed the importance of non-material cultural resources such as supportive relationships for thriving during pregnancy, as well as the far-reaching multigenerational consequences of pregnancy outcomes.

“The ideas that aging begins before birth and that health and well-being carry over into future generations present profound, challenging, and extremely rich avenues for interdisciplinary research,” she says. “The summit was an enriching opportunity to come together with other health scientists from around the globe.”

Abdou joined USC in 2010, coming to the Davis School after completing her PhD in social and health psychology (with a minor in quantitative psychology/statistics) at UCLA and spending two years as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan, where she trained in social epidemiology and population health. In her research, Abdou traces the impact of culture, self-perceptions and the social environment on individuals over the lifespan, starting before birth and extending across generations.

In fact, a study by Abdou linking the importance of communal relationships to the health and happiness of pregnant women made waves last fall. While acknowledging the importance of economics when it comes to health, Abdou explored the epidemiological paradox: the well-documented pattern that many less acculturated Americans thrive despite lower socioeconomic status.

“Given that we have not yet figured out how to eradicate poverty even within our own wealthy nation, it was my goal to find the common denominator among the lines of evidence pointing away from economics and apply this to health disparities research,” Abdou says. “I am especially concerned with what is working against the odds. This, combined with paying attention to the world around me, led me to the study of the health effects of non-material resources and cultural resources, like communalism, in particular.”

Communalism-a sense of cooperation and community-proved a powerful force for pregnancy health, and within the concept, Abdou saw even greater possibilities.

“Happiness, love, a sense of belonging and being valued and informed-these are not just ends in and of themselves; they are also potentially powerful solutions. Almost all solutions to our world’s challenges contain one or more of these elements at the most basic level, and it is no different with health,” she says. “The construct of communalism embodies many of these elements, which are among the very best of our humanness, and I think that’s why we found it to be so meaningful for reducing ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in prenatal health.”

Although Abdou’s study challenges existing assumptions about ethnic and socioeconomic differences in prenatal health, she was not surprised by her findings.

“While ethnicity/race and socioeconomic status are robust predictors of health, we need a better understanding of the specific mechanisms or processes underlying these relationships. There are plenty of people with ample socioeconomic resources who are not particularly healthy or happy; at the same time, there are people with terribly inadequate socioeconomic resources who manage to be healthy, happy, engaged members of our society,” she says. “Communalism seems to be one of those things that supports people in being healthy and happy, particularly against the odds.”

In all of her research, Abdou says she finds herself drawn to exploring the idea that aging begins before birth, and perhaps even farther back, at least to our grandparents’ generation.

“My goal is to continue to expand the scope with which I examine how in utero and early life experiences and exposures affect health later in life and across generations-and not just adversely, but in good ways,” Abdou says. “For example, what are the things that we can do to positively affect the health and aging trajectories of our children and grandchildren?”

Dedicated to investigating multidisciplinary connections, methods and findings, Abdou credits the work of Nancy Adler, Carol Ryff, Claude Steele and Harry Triandis for pointing her in the direction of psychology as a teen; the work of USC’s own Gerontology faculty, including that of Eileen Crimmins and Caleb Finch, for inspiring her current research; and Allison Aiello, Sarah Burgard, Ana Diez Roux, Chris Dunkel Schetter, Adam Fingerhut, Jim House, James Jackson, Sheri Johnson, George Kaplan, Michael Lu, Vickie Mays, Hector Myers, and Jim Sidanius for their inspiration as mentors and collaborators.

“If I had to choose one thing that most inspires me, I would have to say that is building bridges: across disciplines, between academia and communities, from science to its application, and from technical information to a more real-world understanding that all kinds of people can assimilate and use to better their lives,” she says. “The mentors and collaborators I mentioned have inspired me not just because of what they have taught me about psychology, public health, medicine, and sociology, but because of the ways in which they have encouraged and supported me in developing my own ways of thinking about science and about what it means to be healthy.”

As she looks forward to completing her first year at USC, Abdou is brimming with ideas for her future research.

“One of my larger short-term goals is to continue to develop and test the Culture and Social Identity Health Theory, which is the conceptual framework that organizes and drives most of my work,” she says. “As part of this, I am developing a conceptual piece called Aging Before Birth and Beyond.”

There are two specific pieces of this theory that she is currently focusing on. First is the psychology behind health care decisions in diverse groups of people that have particular importance for reproductive outcomes as well as cancer prevention and other diseases for which early detection is crucial. The second is to understand the costs of encouraging people to give up effective but potentially health-compromising coping strategies, such as smoking or overeating, and to investigate alternative coping strategies and interventions.

“I anticipate seeing increased emphasis on lifespan and intergenerational approaches to health research as our appreciation of their impact on health inequalities and on aging grows,” she says. “Transdisciplinary research is the way of the future and eliminates the need to regard physical, psychological, cognitive or any other type of health as distinct from the others; these are in many ways artificial distinctions.”

Seeing the world with an inclusive, interdisciplinary and thorough scientific eye is one of Abdou’s many strengths, and she highlights the universal significance of interconnectedness of people and their life experiences.

“No matter who we are, a sense of belonging and interconnectedness with others is good for our health. At a broader level, I would say that our perceptions of the world around us-and the space that we occupy in that world-matter,” she says, “and perhaps not just for our own health and well-being, but for that of our children and grandchildren as well.”