Money worries can keep us up at night, but could decades of financial stress leave a lasting mark on the brain itself? That’s the question my colleagues and I set out to answer in a new study – and the answer, it turns out, is yes.
Most research on money and brain health looks at people’s financial circumstances at just one point in time. This makes it hard to know whether a few difficult years have the same effect as decades of enduring struggle. For our study, published in the journal Innovation in Aging, we tracked the same people throughout their adult lives to find out.
We used data from the MRC National Survey of Health and Development, also known as the 1946 British birth cohort study. A cohort study follows a group of people born in the same period throughout their lives. This is the world’s longest continuously running study of its kind, tracking thousands of people born in one week in March 1946 – participants who celebrated their 80th birthdays earlier this year.
The study’s origins go back to the economic anxieties of the 1930s, when the Great Depression left many families worrying about money and the cost of raising children – making it a fitting dataset to revisit those same questions decades later. Using this rich resource, we examined the financial circumstances of 2,759 participants at multiple points across adulthood.
Participants reported their household income at ages 26, 43 and 53. We classed those in the bottom 20% of the group on at least two of these occasions as having persistent low income – about one in six people. Separately, we measured financial hardship by asking whether people struggled to manage on their income or had trouble paying bills, at least twice between ages 36 and 53. This applied to about one in eight.
At age 53, participants took tests of verbal memory and processing speed. A smaller group also had brain scans between ages 69 and 71, which let us measure brain atrophy (shrinkage) and ventricular expansion – the widening of fluid-filled cavities within the brain, a recognised marker of poor brain health.
We found that people who had experienced more financial hardship and low income scored lower on the cognitive tests at age 53. These links held even after we accounted for their childhood thinking skills, education and childhood disadvantage. Among those who had brain scans, persistent low income was linked to greater brain shrinkage in later life.
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When we looked at how memory changed from age 53 to 69, those who had faced persistent hardship actually showed slower decline over that period. We believe this is because they had already lost more ground by age 53 – they started from a lower point, so there was less left to lose.
We also found that the link between financial adversity and brain shrinkage was stronger for men, for those who grew up in disadvantaged homes, and for carriers of a gene that raises the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
For men of this generation – born in 1946, when the male breadwinner model was the norm – the pressure of being the main earner may have made financial stress more acute. Disadvantaged men also had higher rates of smoking and drinking than disadvantaged women.
The finding on genetic risk suggests that people who are already biologically vulnerable may be more susceptible to the effects of financial strain. These subgroup findings are based on smaller numbers within our sample, so we are treating them as suggestive rather than conclusive.
Why would money worries harm the brain?
How might financial hardship affect the brain over time? Chronic stress is known to increase inflammation, which accelerates brain ageing. There is also the simple fact that constantly worrying about money uses up mental energy, leaving less capacity for other thinking tasks – a cognitive load that competes with everything else the brain is trying to do.
We acknowledge that our study cannot prove cause and effect, and the results, drawn from a single generation of British adults, may not apply directly to other populations or countries. But following the same people over many years gives us a clearer picture than studies that only look at a single moment in time.
Financial hardship is increasingly recognised as one of several factors – alongside things such as hearing loss, smoking and physical inactivity – that may shape our risk of cognitive decline in later life. Our findings suggest that reducing chronic financial hardship among working-age adults, wherever they live, could help protect brain health and potentially reduce dementia cases in the future.
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