Poverty in childhood can shape neurobiology: study

[undeterred]

By Jean-Louis Santini (AFP) 2/21/2010

SAN DIEGO, California — Living in poverty can shape the neurobiology of a developing child "in powerful ways", affecting children's behavior, health and how well they do later in life, a study presented here Sunday shows. US researchers found what they called "a biology of misfortune" among adults who were poor as children, in particular if they lived in poverty before the age of five, the study presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) shows.

Early childhood is a"crucial time for establishing the brain architecture that shape's children's future cognitive, social and emotional well-being," the study says. "Children growing up in a disadvantaged setting show disproportionate levels of reactivity to stress, and it shows at the level of hormonal studies, neurological brain imaging studies and at the level of epigenetic profiling," said Thomas Boyce, of the University of British Columbia.

The researchers studied data on more than 1,500 individuals born between 1968 and 1975 taken from a 40-year demographic study of US households that measured family income during every year of childhood, educational attainment, what level people reached in their careers, plus crime and health as adults. They found "striking differences" in how the children's lives turned out as adults, depending on whether they were poor or comfortably well-off before the age of six.

"Compared to children whose families had incomes of at least twice the poverty line during their early childhood, poor children complete two fewer years of schooling, work 451 fewer hours per year, earn less than half as much," the study said. They also received more than 800 dollars a year more in food stamps as adults, and were more than twice as likely to report poor overall health or high levels of psychological distress, the study said. Poor children were also fatter than their more affluent counterparts, and were more likely to be overweight as adults.

more at: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iRwHHaP5iNN3YPLQFRc2KacU99oA

[Robbie88]

1. K&R Thanks for posting this.

n/t

[Hannah Bell]

2. there's a large body of evidence on this & related topics, studiously ignored

in the msm, which prefers to focus on genotype.

[ThomCat]

3. Can you provide some links?

I'd be interested in that. :)

[Hannah Bell]

4. Well, it's hard to give a single link with an overview, because the research is from

different disciplines, done for varying purposes, not as a single body of work around a single theme. But you could start with epigenetics:

"...the study of changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence...These changes may remain through cell divisions for the remainder of the cell's life and may also last for multiple generations. However, there is no change in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism;<1> instead, non-genetic factors cause the organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently.<2>"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics


Do our ancestors’ experiences from several generations ago play a role in our current
health? Could a famine or a period of food abundance experienced by our grandfathers
affect whether we are currently obese or likely to develop diabetes? Can being the grandchildren
of those who suffered through genocide or intense racial discrimination affect
levels of certain chemicals in our brains even if we are not exposed to the same social
stresses? In other words, do we biologically inherit the “memories” of past generations
independent of changes to our ancestors’ genetic code or DNA?

http://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=fac_pm


The implications of the epigenetic revolution are even more profound in light of recent evidence that epigenetic changes made in the parent generation can turn up not just one but several generations down the line, long after the original trigger for change has been removed. In 2004 Michael Skinner, a geneticist at Washington State University, accidentally discovered an epigenetic effect in rats that lasts at least four generations...

Michael Meaney, who studies the impact of nurturing, likewise wonders what the implications of epigenetics are for social policy. He notes that early child-parent bonding is made more difficult by the effects of poverty, dislocation, and social strife. Those factors can certainly affect the cognitive development of the children directly involved. Might they also affect the development of future generations through epigenetic signaling?

"These ideas are likely to have profound consequences when you start to talk about how the structure of society influences cognitive development," Meaney says. "We're beginning to draw cause-and-effect arrows between social and economic macrovariables down to the level of the child's brain. That connection is potentially quite powerful."

Historically, genetics has not meshed well with discussions of social policy; it's all too easy to view disadvantaged groups—criminals, the poor, the ethnically marginalized—as somehow fated by DNA to their condition. The advent of epigenetics offers a new twist and perhaps an opportunity to understand with more nuance how nature and nurture combine to shape the society we live in today and hope to live in tomorrow.

"Epigenetics will have a dramatic impact on how we understand history, sociology, and political science," says Szyf. "If environment has a role to play in changing your genome, then we've bridged the gap between social processes and biological processes. That will change the way we look at everything."

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/nov/cover/article_view?b_start:int=3&-C



Reading about the Hunger Winter research in grad school got me interested in this area:

IN THE WINTER MONTHS of 1944-45, the Nazis imposed an embargo on the western part of the Netherlands, fomenting a seven-month famine that had a clear beginning and end. During this time, Dutch officials maintained detailed health care registries and food-rationing documentation.

The resulting famine left permanent epigenetic marks in fetuses conceived at the time. Unfortunate as the circumstances were, to those now pushing into an emerging research arena called environmental epigenetics, the Dutch Hunger Winter, as this wartime episode is known, has provided rare opportunities to study how environmental conditions reach inside fetal cells and influence the genetic program of human beings throughout their lives...

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8714sci1.html


There's also the related "fetal programming" hypothesis:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/more-genes/200910/more-genes-i-so-what-is-fetal-programming

http://jp.physoc.org/content/547/1/3.full

http://www.uni-jena.de/en/fetalprogramming_ResearchAreas.html



There's also a lot on poverty/hierarchy/inequality r/t health, IQ, school performance, mental illness etc. Not in a straightline way like "poorer nutrition = poorer health," but in the more indirect ways you're (I think) interested in as well, e.g.:


http://www.amazon.com/Unhealthy-Societies-Afflictions-Richard-Wilkinson/dp/0415092353

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Studies

The first Whitehall Study compared mortality of people in the highly stratified environment of the British Civil Service. It showed that among British civil servants, none of whom was poor in the absolute sense, there was a social gradient in mortality that ran from the bottom to the top of society. The more senior one was in the employment hierarchy, the longer one might expect to live compared to people in lower employment grades... A striking finding from the Whitehall Studies was that the social gradient was observed for a range of different diseases: heart disease, some cancers, chronic lung disease, gastrointestinal disease, depression, suicide, sickness absence, back pain and general feelings of ill-health...

There's lots of one-off studies on this kind of thing going back decades.


One of the most interesting books I ever read was a study of global "discriminated-against" minority groups. Across the globe, discriminated minority groups were similar in that they had worse health, poorer scores on e.g. IQ tests, higher rates of mental illness, etc. than the majority group in their country.

But interestingly (for a young person enculturated in the American experience where minority status & poverty are closely linked to racial difference), many global discriminated-against minorities are genetically/physically indistinguishable from the majority group.

Like the Japanese burakumin:

"...descendants of outcast communities of the feudal era...those with occupations considered "tainted" with death or ritual impurity (such as executioners, undertakers, workers in slaughterhouses, butchers or tanners)....They were legally liberated in 1871 with the abolition of the feudal caste system.

However, this did not put a stop to social discrimination and their lower living standards, because Japanese family registration (Koseki) was fixed to ancestral home address...which allowed people to deduce their Burakumin membership...

In certain areas of Japan, there is still a stigma attached to being a resident of such areas, including some lingering discrimination in matters such as marriage and employment. The long history of taboos and myths of the buraku left a continuous legacy of social desolation..."

The book stated that the average difference between IQ scores of burakumin & non-burakumin was about 15 points, identical at the time to the average difference in black v. white scores in the US.

But the burakumin weren't genetically different from other Japanese.

This was revelatory for my youthful self, enculturated in the supposedly scientific genetic explanation (e.g. the Bell Curve & prior similar works).

It was a fascinating book, but it was something I pulled browsing in the university stacks - no idea what it was called, wish I remembered.


Anyway, hope this is the kind of thing you wanted.


Edit: I forgot - there's animal research too.

[ThomCat]

5. That's wonderful!

That's more than I expected. Thank you very much! :hug:

I now have some reading to do, and some digging to do on my own when I have the time and ability. :)

[Hannah Bell]

6. you're welcome. i want more people to know about this kind of research because

there's such a determined effort to promote the "inborn difference" angle as a way to justify oppressive/neglectful social policy.

also, it's pretty darn interesting.

[tabatha]

7. This is what I have maintained for a long time.

South African black kids under Apartheid had terrible deprivation with respect to food.
And that, in many repsects, explains the high crime rate in South Africa.

[undeterred]

8. I knew a doctor who worked in a prison.

She was an internist by training, and whenever she saw a new patient she took a history and performed a physical exam. Some of the patients had never had a doctor ask these kind of questions before. They didn't grow up being seen by a doctor; maybe the only medical treatment they had was in an emergency. So they didn't know if they'd had the chicken pox or not, and nobody was looking out to see if they were growing up healthy. When she inquired about injuries she found that there were a lot of head injuries, possibly traumatic brain injuries.

This is the result not only of growing up poor, but also growing up around endemic violence and not having access to medical care. Brain injuries leads to all kinds of problems. But nobody had ever provided care to these prisoners until they got into the system. And years later, there was not a lot she could do for them.