Living in an unequal society impacts the structure of children’s brains, study finds

The distribution of wealth between different people living in specific geographical regions has changed substantially over the past decades, with some segments of the population benefiting most from economic growth than others. In some parts of the United States, the United Kingdom and various European countries, the distribution of wealth has become increasingly uneven.

An uneven wealth distribution essentially means that there is significant disparity in the income and resources of the general population, with some people earning good salaries and others living in the same place struggling to meet their basic needs. This inequality is typically measured with a value ranging from 0 to 1, known as the Gini coefficient, where 0 represents perfect equality and 1 extreme inequality.

Researchers at King’s College London, Harvard University and the University of York recently carried out a study aimed at exploring the possible impact of living in a society where wealth is unevenly distributed on the brain’s development in late childhood and pre-adolescence. Their findings, published in Nature Mental Health, suggest that living in places with a high income inequality is associated with differences in the structure of some brain regions, which could in turn predict the emergence of mental health disorders.

“We wrote a recent conceptual review on how inequality may influence mental health,” Divyangana Rakesh, first author of the recent paper and lecturer at King’s College London, told Medical Xpress. “As a developmental cognitive neuroscientist, that made me curious about the neurobiological pathways underlying this link. With the advent of datasets like ABCD, it has become possible to test this sort of a question.”

As part of their study, Rakesh and her colleagues analyzed data from the ABCD dataset, which was collected from over 8,000 9–10-year-old children living across 17 U.S. states, along with Gini coefficients for these states. The data they analyzed included magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans showing the thickness, surface area and volume of specific regions of the children’s brain, as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans showing the connections between 12 key regions in their brains.

In their analyses, the researchers controlled for other factors that might be influencing the development of the children’s brains, such as their family’s income, education, health care access and incarceration rates in their home state. In addition, they looked at the children’s reported mental health 18 months after the brain scans were collected.

“While numerous studies have examined links between individual dimensions of social economic status (e.g., family income or parent education), ours is an important contribution, as it links a structural characteristic of a society to children’s brain structure and function,” said Rakesh. “Our findings highlight that structural inequality, over and above family income, is associated with children’s brains.”

The results of the analyses performed by Rakesh and her colleagues suggest that living in an unequal society is associated with a thinner cortex (i.e., the brain’s outer layer), as well as significant differences in the surface area of various brain regions. In addition, the communication between some brain networks appeared to be altered in children living in places marked by higher income inequality.

The differences observed by the researchers could partly explain the relationship they found between state-wide inequality and children’s mental health, particularly the emergence of disorders in children living in unequal environments. In the future, the findings of this study could inform the development of interventions aimed at promoting greater equality or promoting the healthy development of children living in unequal societies.

“In future studies, I would like to replicate these findings using data collected in the UK as well as international data, if possible,” added Rakesh. “Moreover, I plan to test associations with longitudinal brain development.”

© 2025 Science X Network