In Italy, just moving a few kilometers is enough to change the pace of life, access to services, air quality, ability to move, even life expectancy. It is not a suggestion from a conversation about the suburbs: today Istat measures socioeconomic hardship even at a sub-municipal level in 25 cities, from Rome to Milan, from Naples to Palermo, precisely to photograph where social, work and educational opportunities are dwindling to the point of becoming a structural problem.
A study by the NYU School of Global Public Health, published on, fits into this framework Social Science & Medicinewhich tried to look even more deeply: not only whether the neighborhood conditions health and longevity, but whether it manages to leave a trace within the processes of cellular aging. The researchers analyzed data from 1,215 U.S. adults from the MIDUS project and found an association between neighborhoods with fewer opportunities and higher levels of CDKN2A, one of the key markers of cellular senescence.
As cells age, they stop dividing, remain metabolically active and release substances that fuel inflammation. It is a mechanism that studies link to frailty and diseases in old age. In the NYU work the authors observed various molecular indicators, but the clearest signal came from CDKN2A.
Stable job, safe home and margin of living
The study’s strongest finding is that the association remains visible even after accounting for other socioeconomic, health, and behavioral factors. And above all it focuses on the social and economic factors of the neighborhood: work, income, housing stability, possibility of social movement. More than individual behaviour, it seems to be the continuous pressure of a context that keeps people in a condition of chronic precariousness that weighs heavily.
If this story sounds familiar, it’s because the data points in the same direction here too. Istat defines socioeconomic hardship as the difficulty in adequately satisfying basic needs due to the lack or insufficiency of social, economic, work and educational resources and opportunities. And that discomfort is now measured neighborhood by neighborhood, or almost, in 25 Italian municipalities. It means the problem is concrete enough to merit an official map, not a vague feeling.
In Rome, for example, a study published in Epidemiology & Prevention from the Department of Epidemiology of the Lazio Regional Health Service has shown that between the health districts of the city there are differences in life expectancy of up to approximately 3 years for men and 2.2 years for women, with a more marked disadvantage in the most socially deprived groups and in the areas of the eastern suburbs compared to the districts of the historic centre.
The national picture is no longer reassuring. According to Istat, in 2024 life expectancy at birth reached 83.4 years, but with clear territorial gaps: 82.1 years for men and 86.0 for women in the North, against 80.3 and 84.6 in the South. Campania records the lowest values, with 79.7 years for men and 83.8 for women. It is not the exact same indicator as the American study, but it tells the same fracture: the place where you live continues to weigh on the body.
The uncomfortable point is always the same
The same materials from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità remind us that even in Italy the differences in health, morbidity and disability follow the lines of income, education and social position. The NYU study adds a piece that is hard to ignore: those inequalities could also be imprinted at the cellular level. Ergo: the problem lies not only in the individual’s lifestyle, but in structural conditions that accumulate every day and work in silence.
This is why the idea that it is enough to “try harder” holds less and less hold. If the neighborhood concentrates precariousness, fragile houses, few opportunities and little space to breathe, the bill does not only come in the paycheck or in the quality of life. It could arrive earlier, much earlier, inside the body. And there the excuses end.
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