Enduring racism can harm the brain, study on 17,000 Black women finds. Here’s how
New research shows that Black women who experience daily and institutional racism have nearly triple the risk of cognitive impairment than women with no such experiences.
A study of more than 17,000 Black women paints a picture of how chronic stress from dealing with discrimination in the workplace or racial slurs affects the body from the inside out, and how such experiences can lead to racial disparities in cognitive disease.
The study was published Tuesday in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.
“Racism is bad for the health of the individual on the receiving end,” study senior author Dr. Lynn Rosenberg, an epidemiologist at Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University, told Inverse. “Everyone is affected by stressors, but African Americans have the additional heavy burden of the stress of racism. Given the large literature documenting the harmful health effects of stressors, it should not be a leap for people to realize that racism has harmful health effects as well.”
The team used data from the Black Women’s Health Study — collected between 1995 and 2015 — of 17,320 participants between 21 and 69 years old who answered questions on their lifestyle, reproductive history, demographics and medical conditions.
The majority of the cohort was followed up with every two years to report disease incidence and exposures to racism, the study said.
Based on six questions on memory and cognition, the researchers learned that Black women reporting the highest level of daily racism had 2.75 times the risk of poor “subjective cognitive function” than women reporting the lowest level.
Experiences of daily racism were determined by answering questions such as “you receive poorer service than other people in restaurants or stores,” “people act like you’re not intelligent” and “people act as if they are afraid of you,” according to the study.
The team also discovered that women in the highest category of institutional racism — unfair treatment in housing, police stops, court appearances, hospitals and at work — had a 2.66 times higher risk of poor cognitive function than those who did not report such experiences, the study said.
“Our findings of a positive association of experiences of racism with poorer subjective cognitive function are consistent with previous work demonstrating that higher perceived psychological stress is associated with greater subjective memory decline,” Rosenberg, who also is the principal investigator of the BWHS, said in a news release. “Our work suggests that the chronic stress associated with racial discrimination may contribute to racial disparities in cognition and Alzheimer’s disease.”
Chronic stress, no matter the cause, typically attacks the hippocampus — the region of the brain involving memory — meaning diseases such as Alzheimer’s can eventually arise from years of dealing with racial discrimination, the researchers said.
It’s well known that rates of dementia and Alzheimer’s are higher in Black Americans than white Americans, so now the researchers want to learn whether racism speeds the conversion of the observed cognitive decline to such diseases, according to the release.
Institutional and daily forms of racism have also been associated with increased risk of depression, poor sleep, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity and asthma.
This story was originally published July 21, 2020 at 4:06 PM with the headline "Enduring racism can harm the brain, study on 17,000 Black women finds. Here’s how."
