A new study has suggested that poverty may increase the risk of developing neurological impairment.
According to research, those children who came from a low income environment have higher risk of developing neurological impairment compared to those children who have a secure economic environment. The said research was performed by the National Institutes of Health with the help of other institutions.
The study was conducted by analyzing the data of 35,443 participants in the US Collaborative Perinatal Project (CPP) dating between 1959 to1974. The participants who are children were tasked to have neurological examinations. The examination included the autonomic nervous system during birth, at 4 months, 1 year and 7 years old.
Throughout the examination, CPP participants were divided into 3 main groups composed of low, medium and high in terms of socioeconomic difficulty.
The results showed that at 4 months, the "high" group have 12.8% higher risk of having neurological impairment than the "low" group which has 9.3% chance. For 7 years old, the "high" group have 20.2 % chance of having the said abnormality compared to the 13.5 % chance of the "low" group.
Stephen Gilman explained in a statement the results of the experiment.
"The size of the effect we saw was modest. However, the findings do indicate that an impoverished environment may pose a hazard for a child's developing nervous system," stated by the senior author of the study which is also the acting chief of Health Behavior Branch at NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).
Although the research is quite an achievement, the authors stated that further exploration of the study is still needed in order to fully distinguish the relationship between the neurological impairment and poverty.
The new research is now published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
