In 2003, a group of academics began a study that measured educational persistence among low-income parents attending community colleges across the country, including one in New Orleans. Participants reported economic status, social ties, and mental and physical health over two rounds of surveys. Then, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit .
Nearly two decades later, PSTC postdoctoral research associate Meghan Zacher continues to mine this original data set. With follow-up information, she said the data provides a rare opportunity to study the effects of disasters by measuring changes before and after they occur. Zacher is a member of the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (“RISK”) Project, which has conducted three follow-up surveys and three rounds of qualitative interviews with the original participants since the disaster.
In a newly published paper for the American Journal of Public Health, Zacher and colleagues measure the physical health effects of Hurricane Katrina. She said that while lots of disaster research has studied mental trauma, “less research has focused on the effects of disasters on physical health, but we might expect such effects, given the physical toll that trauma and stress can take.” The team studied symptoms including headaches or migraines, back problems and digestive problems.
Their research found that the number of traumatic experiences an individual endured during Katrina predicted new physical symptoms in the first survey following the disaster. “In other words, respondents who experienced more stressors during Katrina were more likely to report new symptoms shortly afterwards,” Zacher said. They also found that physical symptoms first reported right after the disaster were more likely to resolve over the following decade than physical symptoms reported earlier, suggesting that disaster-induced physical symptoms were less likely to become chronic. According to Zacher, this finding “suggests that there's kind of this light at the end of the tunnel for disaster survivors.”
Zacher believes the study participants “reflect a real priority population for public health and disaster research.” About 80% of the study’s participants identify as Black or African American and all were low-income at the start of the study. “Low-income folks and people of color tend to live in disaster-vulnerable areas for a whole host of historical and contemporary reasons,” she said. “Many also face barriers to evacuation, like not owning a car, or relocation, like not having family or friends with a spare room.” She added that disaster research is critical to combating inequality.
In another paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences over the past summer, Zacher and two of the RISK team members used these same data to analyze which stressors have the greatest and most persistent impact on mental and physical health. They found that three traumatic experiences in particular—bereavement, fearing for loved ones’ well-being, and lacking access to medical care and medications—predicted mental and physical health outcomes, with more persistent effects on mental health than physical symptoms.
Zacher is not done with the RISK data yet. She is now studying the long-term effects of disasters on children. Her research suggests that a mother’s disaster-related trauma indirectly affects adolescent mental health by affecting the mother’s mental health. She believes these results emphasize “the importance of mental health care right after disasters, because lingering issues can kind of trickle through the family members and into the next generation.”
Zacher said she is grateful for having access to such unique data. “I feel really lucky to be involved,” she added.