As if you didn’t have enough to worry about: Now, it turns out, stressing about money could have a long-term effect on your brain.
A new study, published in Innovation in Aging, looked at data collected from 2,759 people over the course of more than seven decades, in what is known as the 1946 British birth cohort. The U.K. Medical Research Council’s National Survey of Health and Development collected participiants’ information through questionnaires and home and clinic visits.
The origins of the study go back to the 1930s, a time of great financial stress, when a global economic downturn and Great Depression in the U.S. had people worried about their finances, including the cost of having children. The initial survey recorded the births of 5,362 babies.
The new Aging study looked at more than 2,700 cohort participants who were still alive at age 69 (those who are still alive today turned 80 in March). And what researchers found is fascinating: Persistent money struggles were linked to faster aging of the brain.
“Most studies on cognitive aging look at financial hardship at only a single point in time,” study researcher Jacques Wels said in a news release. “Our study using several decades of data allows us to see that it is the accumulation of hardship over many years that is linked to the worst cognitive health outcomes, rather than occasional episodes of adversity.”
Researchers found that members of the cohort who had grown up experiencing either constant money problems or low income as younger adults did not perform as well cognitively on tests by age 53.
They also looked at brain scans and found that the people who made little money had worse brain health, including more brain shrinkage by ages 69 to 71. The results took into account factors such as childhood cognition, education level, and childhood disadvantage.
“Persistent financial adversity impacts cognitive performance by midlife and later-life brain atrophy, with larger effects for men, those from disadvantaged childhoods, and individuals with greater genetic risk,” the study concluded, adding that “supporting financially vulnerable working-age adults could help prevent dementia in an aging population.”
