Long-term financial hardship may accelerate cognitive decline and brain aging, according to a large British study spanning more than 70 years. Researchers found that people exposed to persistent money problems during adulthood had lower memory and processing-speed scores by midlife, as well as signs of greater brain shrinkage in their 70s. Men, people from disadvantaged childhood backgrounds, and carriers of the Alzheimer’s risk gene APOE-ε4 appeared to be particularly vulnerable.
Long-term financial stress may accelerate age-related cognitive decline and brain shrinkage. Image credit: Thomas Breher.
“Dementia is one of the leading contributors to the global burden of disease, and rates are estimated to triple to 150 million cases over the next three decades,” said University College London’s Dr. Jacques Wels and colleagues.
“There is a need to better understand how modifiable environmental exposures may be associated with cognitive aging.”
“The association between childhood and adulthood socioeconomic circumstances and cognitive functioning has been demonstrated at different stages of the life course.”
“Financial adversity — commonly defined as a lack of money or resources to meet basic household needs — is also associated with cognitive impairment and decline.”
For the study, the researchers analyzed data from the 1946 British birth cohort, also known as the MRC National Survey of Health and Development. The long-running study was combined with data from Insight 46, a related brain-imaging project.
The team tracked nearly 2,800 participants’ household income and self-reported financial difficulties, including problems paying bills, between the ages of 26 and 53.
Researchers also assessed cognitive performance through age 69. In a subset of approximately 470 participants, they analyzed detailed brain scans collected during the participants’ early 70s.
“Most studies on cognitive aging examine financial hardship at only one point in time,” Dr. Wels said.
“Our study uses several decades of data, allowing us to show that the accumulation of financial hardship over many years is linked to the poorest cognitive health outcomes, rather than occasional episodes of adversity.”
The findings indicated that repeated exposure to low income or financial hardship was associated with poorer processing speed and verbal memory by midlife.
Importantly, persistent financial hardship — rather than brief or isolated periods of difficulty — was most strongly associated with cognitive decline. The results support the accumulation model of life-course disadvantage, which proposes that repeated stressors can compound over time and negatively affect long-term health.
The brain scans added evidence of a possible physical link between chronic financial stress and brain aging.
Participants who experienced persistently low household income had larger ventricular volumes in their early 70s. Enlarged ventricles can indicate a loss of surrounding brain tissue and are often used as a marker of brain atrophy.
When the researchers examined changes in brain volume over an approximately two-year follow-up period, they found no overall direct association between financial hardship and brain-volume changes.
However, several groups appeared to face greater risks. Men with persistent financial hardship showed faster overall brain shrinkage and greater enlargement of the brain’s fluid-filled cavities than women. Participants raised in lower-income households were more vulnerable to hippocampal atrophy — affecting a brain region important for memory — when they also experienced financial strain during adulthood. In addition, carriers of the APOE-ε4 gene variant, the strongest known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, showed the greatest brain-volume losses and highest levels of amyloid protein accumulation when chronic financial adversity was also present.
“Our findings suggest that supporting people experiencing financial hardship and reducing chronic poverty could also help prevent cognitive decline and future dementia cases,” said University College London’s Professor Praveetha Patalay.
The study was published on July 23, 2026, in the journal Innovation in Aging.
_____
Yiwen Liu et al. 2026. Persistent financial adversity and cognitive aging: a life course investigation. Innovation in Aging 10 (8): igag054; doi: 10.1093/geroni/igag054
Source: www.sci.news