Study Reveals How A Woman’s Address Can Quietly Chip Away At Her Memory
We don't often think of where someone lives as having an impact on their chances of developing dementia, but it seems like this is true for women.
fizkes | Shutterstock With dementia becoming ever more prevalent, many people are looking for ways to ensure their brains stay healthy and sharp for years to come. There are a lot of different factors that can affect cognitive decline. It would be easy to assume that your location has no bearing on your memory, but it turns out that for women, where you live actually does.
A study revealed just how important a woman’s address is when it comes to her cognitive abilities as she ages.
A study published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association examined how vital a woman’s address is to her memory, and the findings were startling. Eric W. Dolan covered the study for PsyPost and explained, "women who spend midlife in neighborhoods surrounded by high poverty may experience faster memory decline, especially in the ability to recall information.”
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Researchers utilized data from the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN) to study women between the ages of 49 and 60. Based on the study’s parameters (for example, women with a medical history of certain conditions like stroke were excluded), researchers were able to include 1,391 SWAN participants in their own work.
To compare women’s locations, addresses were tracked throughout the SWAN study. The poverty level of different neighborhoods was determined using data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Then, researchers tested the women on different cognitive skills like working memory, processing speed, and verbal episodic memory.
Living in areas impacted by poverty has a detrimental impact on women's episodic memory as they age.
Dolan noted that processing speed and working memory did not show a huge difference for women living in poorer neighborhoods. Instead, these are two aspects of cognitive health that tend to decline naturally as someone ages, so while those levels did decline for study participants, there was not a significant difference between women who lived in poor and wealthier areas.
Conversely, verbal episodic memory, which does not decline quite as much when aging, was very much impacted by the neighborhood the participants lived in. “The main finding was that women living in high concentrated poverty areas experienced a faster decline in episodic memory, which includes both immediate and delayed recall of information,” he said. Episodic memory is the ability to recall basic events from the past, like how you met your husband.
Women who lived in these areas with high rates of poverty experienced a 7% decline in their immediate and delayed episodic memory over 10 years. For Black women, the rates were even higher for delayed episodic memory, at 10%.
Researchers concluded that women who lived in poor neighborhoods were more likely to experience dementia.
Jinshil Hyun, one of the study authors and an assistant professor in the Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, acknowledged that people who live in areas with higher concentrations of poverty are more likely to experience a host of different health issues. The American Academy of Family Physicians confirmed this and said it could be due to a lack of resources. The study proved the same is true of dementia.
“Our study revealed that women living in areas of concentrated poverty experienced accelerated memory decline even during midlife (approximately 7% per decade),” Hyun said. “Those living in higher income areas did not show significant memory decline. This suggests that living in highly concentrated low-income neighborhoods may be related to increased rates of cognitive aging, potentially increasing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.”
This obviously puts a large number of women at a disadvantage.
The Center for American Progress estimated that there are about 21.4 million women living in poverty in the U.S. All of these women are facing a lack of available resources that can help improve their health.
Based on these numbers, 21.4 million women could be living with a higher risk for dementia and related illnesses. This is incredibly concerning. These women deserve better and should not be subjected to certain health outcomes simply because of where they live.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
