Link Found Between Poverty in Childhood and Inadequate Cognitive Development

A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.

More evidence to show poverty could have adverse impact on one’s cognitive powers. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.

''Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement,'' wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care. When there’s no level playing field, achievement gap is also inevitable.

Some biological explanation is now available. In lab animals, stress hormones and high blood pressure are associated with reduced cell connectivity and smaller volumes in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Also hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brains of animals. It's in these brain regions that working memory is centered. The same basic mechanisms could operate in kids it is felt, resulting in underperformance.

Scientists say the socioeconomic status predicts a battery of key mental abilities, with deficits showing up in kindergarten and continuing through middle school.

''A plausible contributor to the income-achievement gap is working-memory impairment in lower-income adults caused by stress-related damage to the brain during childhood,'' Evans and Schamberg wrote in their paper.

To test their hypothesis, they analyzed the results of their earlier, long-term study of stress in 195 poor and middle-class Caucasian students, half male and half female. In that study, which found a direct link between poverty and stress, students' blood pressure and stress hormones were measured at 9 and 13 years old. At 17, their memory was tested.

Poverty Gravely Affects Children's Brains
Poverty can not only affect IQ of children, but also negatively impact the brain function and behaviour.

Given a sequence of items to remember‚ teenagers who grew up in poverty remembered an average of 8.5 items. Those who were well-off during childhood remembered an average of 9.44 items. So-called working memory is considered a reliable indicator of reading, language and problem-solving ability — capacities critical for adult success.

When Evans and Schamberg controlled for birth weight, maternal education, parental marital status and parenting styles, the effect remained. When they mathematically adjusted for youthful stress levels, the difference disappeared.

Iodine Deficiency affects IQ of Children
Insufficent iodine in the diet of some Irish women has put them at risk of having children with a lower IQ or even attention problems.

''Brain structures change with stress and are affected by early-life stress in animal models,'' said Rockefeller University neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen. ''Now there are beginnings of work on our own species. The Evans paper is an important step in that direction.''

McEwen also noted that, at least in animals, the effects of stress produce changes in genes that are then passed from parent to child. Poverty's effects could be hereditary, wrote Brandon Keim on the Wired.

The findings, though compelling, still need to be replicated and refined. ''They're not really saying which causal events were stressful. They're just measuring biological markers of stress,'' said Kim Noble, a University of Pennsylvania psychobiologist who studies the relationship between child poverty and cognition. Other mental consequences of poverty also need to be measured.

''I think that different cognitive outcomes have different causes,'' said Noble. ''Something like working memory might be more associated with stress, whereas language might be associated with hours spent reading to your children.''

But Noble still said the study ''was very well-done. They have an impressive data set.'' And though some details remain incomplete, she said, evidence of connections between poverty and neurobiology are strong enough to justify real-world testing.

''Policy changes that affect environments that might affect cognitive development and brain change — that's the ultimate future of the field,'' she said.

Source-Medindia
GPL/L