Childhood Hunger a Boost for Elderly Brains?

Older people who remembered going hungry as children were slower to lose their mental sharpness as they reached old age.

The new finding was only true for African-Americans, suggesting that the study hit on a particularly resilient group of people who thrived despite extreme childhood adversity. Even so, the study offers insight into how the experiences we have at very young ages can affect our health much later in life.

"We know that the social experiences of African-Americans and Caucasians in this country have been very different, at least for people over age 65," said Lisa Barnes, a cognitive neuropsychologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "We wanted to measure that and see if it had any effect at all."

In an effort to add to a growing interest in the long-term health influence of childhood adversity, Barnes and colleagues started by interviewing about 6,100 people who lived in Chicago and were enrolled in a study of Alzheimer's. All participants were at least 65 years old when the study began. The average starting age was 75.

In the first interview, seniors answered questions about their childhoods, including details about health, the financial situations of their families and how often someone read books to them. They also took a cognitive exam that included tests of memory.

The study began in 1993. Since then, the researchers have re-interviewed and tested participants every three years. The new study considered up to 16-years of data on some people.

Adults who were raised in the poorest homes scored the worst on their initial cognitive tests, and as expected with age, mental sharpness dropped as people aged.

But among African-Americans, rates of decline were slowest in people who remembered being hungry "sometimes," "often" or "always" as kids and who were thinner than average as older adults, the researchers report today in the journal Neurology. Childhood hunger and body size didn't make a cognitive difference in Caucasians.

"We expected it to come out the other way, that childhood adversity would be related to a faster rate of decline," Barnes said. "We actually found it was protective."

It's possible that calorie-restriction early in life helped cushion the brain from later aging, in line with research that has linked eating less with longer lifespans. But Barnes suspects that non-biological explanations are more likely.

Very few white people in the study reported extreme adversity as children, for one thing, possibly making the sample size too small to detect any relationships in that group.

As for the African-Americans, those who were still alive in their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond likely represent the hardiest members of a population that came of age before the civil rights movement when there were few opportunities available to them.

"One of the things we know is that African-Americans live sicker and die younger than Whites," said Tené Lewis, a psychosocial epidemiologist at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. "When you get to age 65, which is the baseline in the new study, you're already dealing with a heartier African-American population. These are people who, no matter what you throw at them, are particularly resilient."

Read more at Discovery News