What Poverty Does To Your Brain
Recent research suggests that poverty may have a profound effect on the brain. Imaging studies show that the conditions that go hand-in-hand with poverty — a combination of environmental factors and emotional stressors — can actually slow the development of crucial parts of the brain involved in regulating behavior, impulsivity, and mood. And lacking resources appears to promote certain behaviors (such as excessive borrowing) that perpetuate the poverty cycle.
HOW POVERTY IMPACTS BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
Children from low-income households tend to have poorer academic performance and lower standardized test scores than kids from higher-income families, as well as more emotional and behavioral problems, including ADHD, depression, and anxiety. In adulthood, they typically hold fewer advanced degrees and have truncated earning potential. New research suggests this may, in part, be attributed to the way growing up in an impoverished home changes the brain.
A study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics followed 389 kids and teens, aged 4 to 22, from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds between 2001 and 2006. The researchers, including Jamie Hanson, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Center for Developmental Science, and Barbara Wolfe, Ph.D., a professor of economics, population health sciences, and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that kids living in households just above the federal poverty level had gray matter volumes that were 3 to 4 percentage points below the norm for their age group. The lower volume was concentrated in the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes, regions that are implicated in behavioral and learning problems. Among kids living below the federal poverty line, gray matter volumes were 8 to 10 percent below the norm. On average, these kids performed 4 to 7 points worse on standardized tests.
Hanson, Wolfe, and their colleagues calculated that as much as 20 percent of the disparity in test scores could be explained by these maturation gaps.
“We’re still charting what this truly means for behavior, but we’re starting to try to connect it to the various outcomes you often see, things like educational achievement and health-related behaviors and outcomes,” Hanson tells ATTN:. “The hope is that we’ll find neural signatures of that, and then use them to develop interventions and argue for public policy measures that would help families in need.”
Earlier work by Hanson and Wolfe, published in the journal PLOS ONE in 2013, found similar neurodevelopmental disparities between lower- and higher-income children. That study followed 77 kids from a few months after birth until age 4. They found that children born into families with incomes under 200 percent of the federal poverty level had lower gray matter volumes than kids from high-income families. Gray matter volume in kids from middle-income families did not statistically significantly differ from that of their richer peers, suggesting a poverty-specific effect.
These differences weren’t present at birth, Wolfe says. “We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same, regardless of whether or not they were growing up in a poor family. But then as we traced them to age 4, we found areas that were developing more slowly among infants in low-income families.”
The brain regions that are suffering are critical, Hanson adds. “The frontal lobe, the region that helps with self-control and strategy and planning, had a slower growth rate for kids in lower-income households.”
Similarly, in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience in March, Kimberly Noble, MD, Ph.D., an associate professor of neurosciences and education at Columbia, and her colleagues imaged the brains of 1,099 kids, teens, and young adults aged 3 to 20. They found that those who came from families with a yearly income of less than $25,000 had What Poverty Does To Your Brain | PopularResistance.Org:
