This is not surprising since we already know chronic stress changes many body elements in mostly a negative way. This is the first time I've seen that relates the stress of poverty to brain changes.

This needs to be a target for prevention policy.

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"The authors recruited 100 middle-aged volunteers from a Pennsylvania community registry and acquired three important measures from each. First, participants provided information that qualified as an objective indicator of personal and community socioeconomic status (for example, educational attainment and household income). Second, they received the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status. In this scale, participants were presented with a 10 step "social ladder" and asked to place an "X" on the step they perceived as their social standing in comparison with the rest of the United States in terms of income, education and occupation prestige. Finally, the authors also acquired structural neuroimaging data using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This technique allows investigators to quantify an individual's total gray matter volume in targeted brain regions, which can highlight specific deficits in clinical cases, as well as show the presence of greater aptitude with different executive skills (associated with increased brain volume in certain regions.)

To examine general changes in brain volume among the 100 volunteers, the authors selected three specific brain regions previously linked with chronic stress and social standing in non-human animal research: the anterior cingulate, the hippocampus and the amygdala. All three are thought to be critical components of a circuit that integrates autonomic and emotional responses to environmental stimuli and thereby direct the appropriate behavioral response (for instance, coping with stressful situation). The authors found that a lower subjective perception of one's own social status correlated with reduced gray matter in a specific subregion of the anterior cingulate, the perigenual area. This result was consistent even when objective indicators of social status (such as income) were controlled for during subsequent analyses. In addition, subjective social status ladder rankings did not correlate with gray matter volumes in either the hippocampus or the amygdala. This evidence suggests a role for the perigenual area of the anterior cingulate in the subjective perception of social standing, which may, in turn, contribute to health-related issues.

This finding builds on data showing that the perigenual area of the anterior cingulate cortex has a potential role in adaptive responses to emotional and physiological stimuli such as stressors. The region is connected with other brain structures, such as the amygdala and hippocampus, involved in learning and memory, emotional processing and the brain's response to stress. Thus, based on the role of the perigenual area and its connectivity, we can infer that decreases in brain volume in the perigenual cingulate cortex have an impact on a broad set of functions related to maintaining emotional stability and wellbeing. The fact that such decreases in brain volume are greater for individuals that perceive themselves as lower on the totem pole highlights a neural mechanism for why low socioeconomic status contributes to poor health in the long run."