Anti-poverty schemes may help poor children’s brains grow normally Premium

The relationship between brain development and low-income is relatively well-established, but the role of anti-poverty policies in this relationship is not. A new study fills this gap.

In 1844, Frederich Engels remarked in a book that the “physical effects of the living conditions of the poor had their effects from early life”. He had seen scrofula (tuberculosis of the neck), rickets, typhus, cholera, and smallpox as representative of the ways in which poverty is embodied in the bodies of the members of the working classes.

In the 1960s, neuroscientists began finding evidence that growing up poor could affect how a young brain develops. Marian Diamond, then a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that rats that grew up in an “impoverished” environment had “hampered” brain development and learning abilities.

How does poverty affect the brain?

In 2015, three studies reported that human children and young adults growing up in low-income families had lower cortical volume and did relatively poorly in tests for academic performance. The cortex is the outer layer of the brain.

Together with the cortex, one of the 2015 studies focused on another area: the hippocampus. Kimberley Noble, from Columbia University, and her colleagues found that the volume of this deep-seated convoluted structure, widely regarded by scientists as the “seat for learning and memory”, correlated positively with a family’s socioeconomic status, but not parental income.

Now, a study by researchers from Harvard University and Washington University, published earlier this month in the journal Nature Communication, has demonstrated that children growing up in low-income families indeed risk a smaller hippocampus. The researchers, led by David Weissman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Stress and Development Lab, showed that generous anti-poverty policies substantially lower this risk.

The finding highlights how state-level public policies can potentially address the correlation between brain development and low income.