British scientists examined over 2,700 people who were all born in March 1946, meaning they are now 80 years old, who agreed to have their health and social circumstances tracked for years.
In the research released last week, they found that the people who were in the poorest 20 per cent of the group when they were in their mid-20s through early 50s were slower on cognitive tests and scored worse on memory tests when they were middle-aged.
Those who told researchers that they were having trouble paying their bills at least twice in their late 30s or 40s also scored worse down the road.
The paper, published in the journal Innovation in Aging, said the negative impacts on brain health showed up in the data even when the researchers tried controlling for disadvantages in the subjects’ childhoods, and differences in their education and cognition in childhood, suggesting that the financial stress in their adult years was responsible for the changes in their brains.
Cognitive decline for the financially stressed was slower than for their more advantaged peers later in life. But the researchers surmised that was because the damage had already been done, and there was less to lose.
University of Michigan professor Arline Geronimus, who was not involved in the study, wondered when she read the research if instead the people who suffered the worst stress-related health effects, such as heart disease and cancer, had already died in their 50s and 60s.
What sets this study apart from others that have shown the cognitive damage wrought by financial stress, co-author Jacques Wels said, was the access to information about the subjects over decades of their lives, not just a single point in time.
Wels, a quantitative sociologist working at University College London, said in an interview that this study could not untangle how much of the damage to poor people’s brains was caused by the financial stress itself, which can cause harmful inflammation and takes up cognitive space that would otherwise go to other processes, and how much was caused by behaviours that poor people were more likely to take up, including smoking and drinking.
But he said the results strongly suggest that the poverty caused the brain impacts, not the other way round, since the changes in the brain didn’t start appearing until subjects were in their 50s.
“We have some markers of brain health like reading speed, calculation speed and brain scans. … It’s a clear biological marker that something happened over the life course,” Wels said.
Geronimus, whose research focuses on how discrimination can have a “weathering” impact on people’s bodies, said the connection the study draws between financial pressures and cognition may be too simple. “We shouldn’t think it’s just a simple matter of money,” she said. “It does speak to the social inequities that harm brain health.”
Credit: The Washington Post
