Keeping the brain healthy is often linked with exercise, a balanced diet, and staying mentally active. However, scientists now believe that financial security may also play an important role.
A new long-term study has found that people who struggle with money for many years are more likely to experience poorer memory and brain health as they grow older.
The research was carried out by University College London researchers and published in Innovation in Aging. It used information from the famous 1946 British birth cohort study, which has followed thousands of people from birth through adulthood and into their eighties.
Because the same people have been studied for decades, the project offers a rare picture of how life experiences shape health over time.
Many earlier studies measured financial hardship only once. This research instead tracked income and financial stress across several decades, making it possible to see whether ongoing hardship has a stronger effect than occasional financial problems.
More than 2,700 adults took part in the analysis. Researchers compared household income, questions about paying bills and managing daily expenses, memory tests, thinking speed, and brain scans collected later in life.
People who experienced repeated financial hardship or remained in the lowest income group over many years generally performed worse on cognitive tests by their early fifties. These links remained even after accounting for childhood education, early disadvantages, and childhood thinking ability.
Brain scans from participants aged 69 to 71 provided further evidence. People with persistent low income had more brain shrinkage and other changes associated with unhealthy brain aging. Such changes are commonly seen in people at greater risk of dementia, although they do not guarantee that dementia will develop.
The study found that the association was especially strong in men, individuals with disadvantaged childhoods, and carriers of the APOE-e4 gene. This gene is known to increase the likelihood of Alzheimer’s disease, but lifestyle and environmental factors still influence whether people develop the condition.
The researchers believe several biological and psychological processes may explain the findings. Chronic stress can increase inflammation, which has been linked with faster aging throughout the body. Constant concern about money may also place an ongoing mental burden on the brain, reducing the ability to focus on other tasks.
Although participants with financial hardship appeared to decline more slowly after age 53, the researchers think this is because they had already experienced earlier losses in cognitive performance. This highlights the importance of protecting brain health throughout adulthood rather than waiting until old age.
This research shows that brain health is shaped not only by biology but also by the social conditions in which people live. Reducing long-term poverty and helping families achieve greater financial stability could become part of future dementia prevention strategies. The study cannot prove cause and effect, but its long follow-up and careful analysis make the evidence compelling. More research will be needed to test whether improving financial wellbeing can directly reduce dementia risk.
If you care about dementia, please read studies that eating apples and tea could keep dementia at bay, and Olive oil: a daily dose for better brain health.
For more health information, please see recent studies what you eat together may affect your dementia risk, and time-restricted eating: a simple way to fight aging and cancer.
Source: University College London.
