Infants in poverty have reduced grey matter in brain
Question asked:
“Infants living in poverty have lower grey matter volumes in the frontal and temporal cortex and the hippocampus.”
Summary
Research consistently shows that infants and newborns from low‑income families exhibit reduced gray matter volume in frontal and temporal cortical regions as well as in the hippocampus. Multiple neuroimaging studies and meta‑analyses across the past decade confirm these structural differences associated with poverty.
Sources 55 searched
- Family poverty affects the rate of human infant brain growth - PubMed
Infants from low-income families had lower volumes of gray matter, tissue critical for processing of information and execution of actions. These differences were found for both the frontal and parietal lobes. No differences were detected in ...
- Low household income and neurodevelopment from infancy through adolescence - PubMed
Further, the data reveal that significant structural differences in gray matter development for children living in or near poverty, first detected during childhood (age 2.5-6.5 years), evolve throughout adolescence.
- Poverty from fetal life onward and child brain morphology - PMC
Previous research has also shown some supporting findings: an association between prenatal stress, indexed by intrauterine concentration of cortisol 32 or interleukine-639, and offspring amygdala volumetric differences; and an association of poverty exposure right after birth with lower total ...
- The impact of child poverty on brain development: does money matter? - PMC
The study found that children exposed to lower financial resources had reduced gray matter volume and experienced greater maturational delays compared to less impoverished children. In a meta-analysis by Taylor and Barch, a connection between reduced inhibitory control (IC) and lower academic ...
- Association of Child Poverty, Brain Development, and Academic Achievement - PMC
Poverty is tied to structural ... among children from the poorest households. Regional gray matter volumes of children below 1.5 times the federal poverty level were 3 to 4 percentage points below the developmental norm (P < .05)....
- Poverty from fetal life onward and child brain morphology | Scientific Reports
Most studies reported positive associations between income and total gray and white matter volumes5,9,10, indicating that poverty and structural deprivation have a global impact on brain development, possibly as part of stunted growth.
- The ecology of poverty and children’s brain development: A systematic review and quantitative meta-analysis of brain imaging studies - ScienceDirect
In general, poverty was associated ... regions. Among 14,188 participants and 14,057 participants, poverty was associated with smaller gray matter volumes in the amygdala and hippocampus, respectively....
- CHAPTER FOUR The impact of childhood poverty on brain health: Emerging
neuroimaging, found that infants from lower income households had · smaller or less gray matter volume in both the frontal and parietal lobes
- Poverty, crime linked to differences in newborns’ brains | WashU Medicine
MRI scans of full-term newborns born to mothers living in poverty revealed smaller volumes across the entire brain — including the cortical gray matter, subcortical gray matter and white matter — than found in the brains of babies whose ...
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