Our life experiences—especially social ones—shape who we are. But they don’t just affect our identity.
They also influence our long-term health, including the health of our brain.
Things like childhood hardships, the quality of education, financial stress, food insecurity, exposure to violence, and lack of access to healthcare can pile up over time.
A new international study shows that this long-term stress, called the “social exposome,” is closely linked to problems in mental and brain health.
The study was published in Nature Communications and led by researchers from Trinity College Dublin, the Global Brain Health Institute, and others.
They looked at data from 2,211 people in six Latin American countries, including both healthy individuals and those living with Alzheimer’s or frontotemporal dementia.
Researchers developed a detailed assessment of the social exposome by analyzing 319 different factors—everything from childhood labor to education level, family relationships, and financial status.
The more negative these social conditions were throughout a person’s life, the worse their brain performed.
People with more social adversity showed poorer memory and thinking, more difficulty in daily activities, and worse mental health. Brain scans also showed physical and connectivity changes in the brain.
Importantly, these problems weren’t caused by individual hardships alone. It was the build-up of many problems over a lifetime that mattered the most.
Even when the researchers considered other variables like age, country of origin, and imaging methods, the results stayed the same. This suggests that social stress gets “built into” our biology, affecting how the brain grows, functions, and ages.
This research tells us something powerful: we need to start protecting brain health early in life. Waiting until midlife to treat conditions like high blood pressure or diabetes isn’t enough. If we want to prevent dementia, we must act sooner—by making sure children grow up in healthy environments with access to good food, healthcare, and education.
In Latin America, up to 56% of dementia cases may be linked to things that can be changed—like depression, poor diet, and lack of exercise. That’s higher than the global average of 46%.
These numbers show how social conditions shape brain health and explain why the burden of dementia is especially high in areas with more inequality.
The study’s authors stress that personalized prevention strategies should consider a person’s full social history. This means building prevention plans that are tailored to someone’s unique life experiences and challenges.
In short, to truly support healthy brain aging and reduce the risk of dementia, we need to consider not just medical care, but the full picture of a person’s life—starting from childhood and continuing throughout adulthood.
If you care about brain health, please read studies about inflammation that may actually slow down cognitive decline in older people, and low vitamin D may speed up cognitive decline.
For more health information, please see recent studies about common exercises that could protect against cognitive decline, and results showing this MIND diet may protect your cognitive function, prevent dementia.
The study is published in Nature Communications.
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