Children’s zip codes change their brains, new study finds

Children living in areas with low socioeconomic opportunities have more tired and stressed brains, a new study finds

Where children live and what their household’s socioeconomic status is leaves a mark on their brains, a new study in Science finds. The results suggest that the fewer opportunities a child’s zip code affords, the more tired and stressed their brain appears—and that socioeconomics by far outweighs hundreds of other possible environmental factors in determining a child’s brain function and structure .

“Socioeconomic came out ahead by like a million miles,” says Nico Dosenbach, the study’s senior author and a professor of neurology at the Washington University in St. Louis. Other factors generally thought to be important to child brain development , such as a child’s culture and overall health and their caregivers’ parenting style, didn’t rise above the fold at all, he adds.

Dosenbach and his colleagues used a dataset from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, a long-term investigation of brain development and child health in the U.S. Using thousands of children’s brain scans, the scientists made maps of each child’s brain function and structure and then weighed them against 649 variables.

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These variables included IQ and cognitive test measures, demographic and cultural information, and mental and physical health records, as well as the child’s score on a measure called the Child Opportunity Index (COI). The COI measures and maps the quality of resources such as safe housing, food access and schools nearby. Then the researchers looked for patterns in the brain maps that could reveal which factors were most associated with significant changes in the brain . The researchers compared what they were seeing with another, totally unrelated adult sample—the U.K. Biobank—and found that the same patterns persisted.

“A lower socioeconomic brain—so a child who grows up at the lower end, their brain looks more tired and stressed out,” Dosenbach says. “It doesn’t look dumber. The pattern of association completely spares the cognition areas of the brain.”

That’s important, Dosenbach stresses: past research has suggested that socioeconomic status is linked to IQ and cognitive scores, but the new results indicate the reason may be entirely to do with how sleep deprived and stressed a child is when they are tested—not their basic cognitive ability. That finding came as a shock to Dosenbach and the study’s first author, Scott Marek.