People who live in poorer neighborhoods are linked to having accelerated brain aging and a higher risk for dementia early in life, regardless of their income level or education, a new report finds.
The study, published on Thursday in Alzheimer’s & Dementia indicates that targeting disadvantaged neighborhoods with dementia prevention programs and encouraging clinicians to consider a patient’s address could be useful to lower dementia risk.
“If you want to prevent dementia, and you’re not asking someone about their neighborhood, you’re missing information that’s important to know,” Aaron Reuben, PhD, a clinical neuropsychologist at Duke University and author, said in a statement.
Though lifestyle changes may help boost brain health and resilience, Reuben wanted to see if location had a role in dementia risk.
“I wanted to understand if there was a geographic patterning to dementia the way there is to longevity, like blue zones,” Reuben said.
Blue zones are areas where people tend to live longer than average.
Reuben and collaborators from the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Otago, and the University of Auckland, evaluated medical records and addresses of 1.41 million people who lived in New Zealand. The team assigned scores to people’s addresses using census data, which included details on employment, income, education and transportation access.
People who lived in the most disadvantaged areas had a 43% increased risk of developing dementia over a 20-year span, the data showed.
Next, the team looked at a study that tracked about 1,000 people in the country from birth, which included memory tests, brain scans and cognitive self-tests. Again, those who lived in the disadvantaged neighborhoods as adults had significantly poorer brain health as early as age 45, despite their income or education status.
Though researchers aren’t sure how poorer neighborhoods may increase the risk for dementia, they suspect that poor air quality, lower levels of daily social interactions, higher levels of stress and less walkability could play a role.
