(soft music) - The Vanderbilt University Social Network's Aging and Policy Study, which we call VUSNAPS is about this idea that negative life experiences like discrimination, harassment, and violence that LGBTQ people experience in their lifetime have effects on health.

VUSNAPS is great because we have this study that's capturing people over three to five years-basically.

We're re-interviewing the same people, which is amazing because lots of studies don't do that.

And some of the exciting pieces of this are actually collecting people's DNA and collecting people's blood to look at markers of stress, to look at how their bodies are physically aging, beyond just, you know, your calendar age, we're looking at people's biological age.

What is actually happening at the DNA level in terms of your aging, and how are those experiences of discrimination, stress, violence actually impacting people's lives in those ways in terms of their actual biological age?

(soft music) We've been able to link people's experiences of discrimination to sleep quality disruptions.

And sleep is a massively important part of our health.

We really don't give it enough credit.

And what happens for older LGBTQ folks is compared to older heterosexual adults, they've had more of those negative life experiences.

That stress is actually interrupting their sleep so they don't fall asleep as fast.

They wake up more in the middle of the night.

Sleep quality is linked to a range of different health outcomes like obesity, like cardiovascular health.

We are specifically interested in looking at how it affects people's cognitive aging and impairment.

And, you know, this is one of the key factors that might be driving Alzheimer's, for example.

So this is an important area for us to also be able to kind of show that there's a disparity here, right?

That these experiences matter not only because they matter in and of themselves but because they have these continual effects on people as they age that create a gap in older age for LGBTQ folks, with them having worse outcomes on average.

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