A study in Scientific advance revealed correlations between socioeconomic, genetic, environmental factors and brain structure. Socioeconomic status is often determined by characteristics such as an individual’s income, education, and occupation and is related to quality of life, physical and mental health.
The scientists analyzed the impact of environment, genetics and socioeconomic status on the human brain. Image credit: Farah, Koellinger, et al. Scientific advance
The findings provide a deeper understanding of how socioeconomic, environmental and genetic factors interact to affect people. brain development and structure. This effort is funded by a grant from US National Science Foundation.
An international team, including researchers at Penn Stateanalyzed a large amount of data from UK Biobank contains brain scans, gene sequences, and socioeconomic information of nearly 24,000 participants.
The researchers found that both nature and nurture play important roles in brain structure and development, and that only about half of the anatomical features measured in the brain can be attributed to genetic factors. transmission. Socioeconomic factors also play an important role.
“What we found was that some of the relationships between the brain and socioeconomic status could be explained by genetics, but a lot of other relationships persisted even after accounting for genetics. transmission,” said Gideon Nave, study co-author. “This suggests that socioeconomic conditions are affected in some way and may have additional negative effects on the social and economic disparities we see around us.”
The study also revealed different effects of socioeconomic status and environmental factors spanning multiple brain regions. Socioeconomic status can affect physical and mental health, cognitive capacity, educational achievement, and brain development and structure. Understanding more about how environmental and genetic factors influence the effects of socioeconomic status on the human brain could lead to earlier and improved mitigation efforts.
“We know that environmental conditions such as air and water quality can have enormous impacts on growth and size,” said Jonathan Fritz, NSF Cognitive Neuroscience Program Director. of the brain. “This study takes an important step forward by analyzing large data sets and using powerful statistical tools to reveal more clearly than ever the impact of socioeconomic status and environmental quality on the brain, which can lead to profound effects on human cognition.”
The team notes that more research is needed on this topic to move from correlation to causation in explaining how factors such as environment, genetics, and socioeconomic status interact. structure and development of the brain.
Source: NSF
