Newborns from poor and disadvantaged areas have a reduced brain size, and its structure and function differ from the brains of children from richer families.
Such data were obtained as a result of two studies conducted by a group of specialists from the University of Washington (USA).
In the first study, the results of which in the journal JAMA Network Open, scientists analyzed information about 399 expectant mothers from St. Louis, Missouri, living in different socio-demographic conditions: some of the women lived in poverty, and the rest did not. However, all participants had healthy, full-term babies.
At the age of a few weeks, the children of the participants, while they slept, had magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain. It turned out that newborns whose mothers were poor have a smaller overall brain sizethan those of infants whose mothers were in a more favorable financial situation. Moreover, in children from a poor environment, the volumes of all brain components are reduced, including the gray matter of the cortex and subcortical structures, as well as the white matter. In addition, in such infants, the surface of the brain turned out to be less folded, which signals its immaturity.
In the second study, the results of which in the journal Biological Psychiatry, the scientists reanalyzed data on the same women and their children as in the first study.
In the end, it was found that newborns whose mothers lived in disadvantaged areas with a high crime rate during pregnancy had a different brain function than children whose mothers lived in safer conditions during pregnancy. As shown by MRI, in such infants weakened neural connections between brain structures that are responsible for processing emotions, and structures that help regulate and control emotions. According to the researchers, one of the reasons underlying such changes may be maternal stress.
The findings suggest that the environment a woman experiences during pregnancy has a huge impact on the development of her baby’s brain, and can have very long-term effects on brain development and behavior, the researchers said.