Income Inequality Linked to Child Brain Differences, Mental Health

A large multisite study led by King's College London, the University of York and Harvard and published in Nature Mental Health analyzed baseline MRI data and follow-up mental-health measures from 10,071 nine- and ten-year-olds in the US ABCD Study across 17 states. Researchers quantified state-level inequality with the Gini coefficient and found that higher inequality was associated with reduced cortical surface area and altered functional connectivity in brain regions supporting emotion, attention, memory and language. These associations held after controlling for individual family income and parental education, indicating inequality acts as a societal-level determinant of neurodevelopment. Importantly, the neurodevelopmental differences predicted poorer subsequent mental-health outcomes in follow-up measures. The study highlights larger inequality gaps in New York, Connecticut, California and Florida versus narrower gaps in Utah, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Vermont, and argues that reducing inequality is a public-health imperative.