New Delhi: Living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood is not just a social challenge but can significantly impact healthy brain cells, found a recent study.
The findings, published on 15 September in Radiology, came out of a retrospective study of brain MRIs from 1,094 men and 1,732 women aged 18 to 96, respectively. For each patient, researchers calculated an “Area Deprivation Index” (ADI) score to measure the socioeconomic disadvantage of their neighbourhoods.
“We’ve long suspected that your living environment affects your brain, but until now it’s not been proven at scale in clinical populations. We’ve shown very robust, measurable metrics that our living environment has an outsized impact on the brain at the molecular and cellular level,” John-Paul J Yu, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and co-author of the study, said in a statement.
The study revealed that the brains of people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods had aged faster than those living in less deprived areas. These patients even had a lower total brain volume.
According to the study, “older” brains are associated with cardiovascular risks, psychiatric illnesses and other cognitive impairments. The MRIs also revealed that people living in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods had a higher white matter hyperintensity volume.
“White matter hyperintensities are essentially the footprints of cardiovascular damage in the brain. When you live with chronic stressors like high blood pressure, poor sleep or constant stress, blood vessels constrict, restricting blood flow to that part of the brain. Over time, these areas show up as these bright spots on MRI,” said Yu. He added that this is linked to memory loss and even dementia.
According to Yu this is the first time that the impact of an individual’s environment has been studied to find “quantifiable implications for brain health”.
“The conditions in which individuals are born, live, work and age, profoundly shape long-term neurological health outcomes,” he said, adding that it is important to factor in this data when planning health intervention programs, crafting public policy, and identifying geographically defined areas that need improved access to care.