Decades of Money Problems Linked to Faster Brain Aging — SkimNews
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- UCL researchers analyzed data from 2,759 participants in the 1946 British cohort study, finding that persistent financial hardship or low income through early and middle adulthood was tied to poorer cognitive performance at age 53 and more brain atrophy on MRI scans between ages 69 and 71.
- About 16% of participants were classified as having persistent low income (bottom 20% at least twice across ages 26, 43, and 53), while roughly 12% met the threshold for persistent hardship based on struggles paying bills between ages 36 and 53.
- The effects were especially pronounced among men, people who experienced childhood disadvantage, and carriers of the APOE-ε4 Alzheimer's risk gene, with disadvantaged men scoring worse on cognitive tests than disadvantaged women in the same cohort.
- Corresponding author Dr. Jacques Wels said the accumulation of hardship over decades—not occasional episodes—drove the worst outcomes, while senior author Professor Praveetha Patalay argued reducing chronic poverty could help prevent future cognitive decline and dementia cases.
- The study, published in Innovation in Aging, kept its findings intact after controlling for childhood cognitive ability, education level, and childhood disadvantage, and proposed chronic stress, inflammation, and cognitive overload from constant money worries as possible biological mechanisms.
Why it matters: Roughly one in eight people in the study experienced the kind of decades-long financial strain that correlated with measurably worse brain aging by their late 60s, suggesting poverty reduction may have underappreciated long-term dividends in dementia prevention. The findings were published as the 1946 cohort participants turned 80 this year, giving researchers one of the longest cognitive-aging datasets ever assembled.
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