Contributions of Neuroscience to the Study of Socioeconomic Health Disparities

Abstract

Socioeconomic disadvantage confers risk for ill health. Historically, the pathways by which socioeconomic disadvantage may affect health have been viewed from epidemiological perspectives emphasizing environmental, behavioral, and biopsychosocial risk factors. Such perspectives, however, have yet to integrate findings from emerging neuroscience studies demonstrating that indicators of socioeconomic disadvantage relate to patterns of brain morphology and functionality that have been associated with aspects of mental, physical, and cognitive health over the lifecourse. This commentary considers findings from one such study appearing in the current issue of Psychosomatic Medicine. It reports that an area-level indicator of socioeconomic disadvantage relates to cortical morphology in brain regions important for language, executive control, and other cognitive and behavioral functions—possibly via a systemic inflammatory pathway. These findings are put into context by discussing broader questions and challenges that need to be addressed in order for neuroscience approaches to (i) become better integrated with existing epidemiological perspectives and (ii) more fully advance our understanding of the pathways by which socioeconomic disadvantage becomes embodied by the brain in relation to health.

Poverty, household chaos, and interparental aggression predict children's ability to recognize and modulate negative emotions

“…Using this theoretical lens of experiential canalization, we and others have argued that this disruption in children’s recognition of and response to scary and upsetting situations is undergirded by environmentally shaped neurocognitive processes: higher exposure to the acute and chronic dimensions of threat associated with parental fighting, aggression, and violence may lead to alterations in biobehavioral and cognitive responses among conflict-exposed children (Blair & Raver, 2012; Davies, Sturge-Apple, Cicchetti, Manning, & Vonhold, 2012). This theoretical framework is aligned with recent advances in psychological science suggesting that environmental adversity takes a toll on individuals’ ability to detect and appraise stimuli “that signal safety or threat” as well as their ability to modulate mood states and emotions evoked by those stimuli, at both neurobiological and behavioral levels (Frankenhuis & de Weerth, 2013; Gianaros & Hackman, 2013; McDermott, Westerlund, Zeanah, Nelson, & Fox, 2012). With these findings, a number of new questions have arisen.…”

Future Directions in the Study of Early-Life Stress and Physical and Emotional Health: Implications of the Neuroimmune Network Hypothesis

“…Recent studies have highlighted associations between markers of low-grade inflammation and early-life stress, patterns of neural activity, and health-relevant behaviors like smoking, drug use, and obesity(Gianaros & Hackman, 2013; G. E. Miller et al, 2011; Shonkoff, Boyce, & McEwen, 2009).…”

Subcortical structural variations associated with low socioeconomic status in adolescents

“…Understanding why children from low‐SES families show vulnerability to a heterogeneous set of adverse life outcomes is challenging. Low SES is associated with a higher probability of multiple exposures (e.g., neighborhood violence, poor nutrition, housing instability, air pollution, unfair treatment, and insensitive caregiving) known to affect structural development of subcortical brain regions that subserve threat and reward processing, including the hippocampus, amygdala, basal ganglia, and thalamus (Gianaros & Hackman, ; Nusslock & Miller, ; Sheridan & McLaughlin, ). Although these subcortical regions are also crucial for numerous other functions, including memory, attention, and learning (Packard & Knowlton, ; Portas et al, ; Squire, ), their importance in threat and reward processing may be related to exaggerated threat reactivity in youths from low‐SES backgrounds, which manifests in greater sympathetic, hormonal, and inflammatory responses to stressors, and altered reward processing, contributing to dysphoria, substance use, and disinhibited eating.…”