Living in disadvantaged communities accelerates brain aging, MR imaging shows

“We’ve long suspected that your living environment affects your brain, but until now it’s not been proven at scale in clinical populations,” John-Paul J. Yu, MD, PhD, associate professor of radiology, psychiatry, biomedical engineering, biostatistics and medical informatics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s school of medicine, said in an RSNA news release on the findings. “We’ve shown very robust, measurable metrics that our living environment has an outsized impact on the brain at the molecular and cellular level.”