Researchers found a link between family income and children's brain structures.
The recent study suggests these links were strongest in the lowest income economic range, which could mean interventional policies aimed at this group could produce the most significant results, the Children's Hospital Los Angeles reported.
"While in no way implying that a child's socioeconomic circumstances lead to immutable changes in brain development or cognition, our data suggest that wider access to resources likely afforded by the more affluent may lead to differences in a child's brain structure," said Elizabeth Sowell, PhD, director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, part of the Institute for the Developing Mind at CHLA.
The study is the largest of its kind ever conducted, and looked at 1,099 typically developing individuals between the ages of 3 and 20 years. The research included demographic and developmental history questionnaires and high-resolution brain MRIs. The researchers also used statistics to control for factors such as gender, education, and genetic ancestry.
The findings revealed children in the lowest-income families exhibited relatively large differences in surface area in several regions of the brain linked to skills that are believed to be important for academic success. On the other hand, children from higher-income families had smaller differences in these surface areas.
"Family income is linked to factors such as nutrition, health care, schools, play areas and, sometimes, air quality," Sowell said. "Future research may address the question of whether changing a child's environment - for instance, through social policies aimed at reducing family poverty - could change the trajectory of brain development and cognition for the better."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience.
