How Much Do Financial Decline & Cognitive Decline Go Hand In Hand?

That financial health and physical health are intertwined is a sad fact of our society, but how does it go for cognitive health?

Well, first of all, the brain is also an organ, and so is the heart that feeds it, and so are the lungs that supply the blood with oxygen, and so is the gut that… You get the idea. There is no cognitive health without physical health.

But we can also look at cognitive health somewhat in isolation, if we use clever statistical modelling to control for physical health factors that might be adversely affecting cognitive health.

So, what’s the answer?

When your bank balance is something you’d rather not remember…

Researchers (Dr. Katrina Kezios et al.) did exactly that kind of modelling, analyzing data from 7,676 participants in the Health and Retirement Study between 2010–2020, tracking financial well-being and memory over time.

• How financial well-being was measured: an eight-item index measured both psychosocial strain (stress, dissatisfaction) and material hardship (difficulty paying bills, low income, limited access to necessities)
• How cognitive decline was measured: direct memory assessments (immediate and delayed 10-word recall tasks) and, for those too cognitively impaired to complete direct assessments, proxy assessments of memory function (proxy’s assessment of participants’ memory performance on a 5-point Likert scale and the 16-item Jorm Informant Questionnaire for Cognitive Decline) were used to generate a composite memory score.

What Dr. Kezios and her team found is that worsening financial well-being is linked to poorer memory and faster cognitive decline in adults aged 50+.

How bad is it? In few words, people with significant financial deterioration experienced memory decline comparable to about 5 extra months of aging per year.

And importantly, this was dynamic in nature and a one-way slope: declines in financial well-being were consistently linked to worse memory, but improvements in finances didn’t reliably lead to cognitive gains (in essence, you can’t buy more cognitive function, but you can lose it if your finances are poor).

Why does this happen? There are several possibilities, for example study co-author Dr. Adina Zeki Al Hazzouri hypothesized that prolonged financial strain may overload your mental bandwidth, contributing to cognitive decline. Additionally, the paper notes that chronic stress, reduced access to healthcare and nutrition, and less social engagement may all mediate* the relationship between finances and brain health.

^{*mediate, in this context, = provide the mechanism of action for, actively facilitate such that it happens, without necessary nailing their colors to the mast of outright declaring it causal (because the scientists acknowledge there could be unknown additional factors at hand, much like how yeast will in technical terms “mediate” bread rising, but it won’t “cause” a thing without the temperature being right)}

You can read the paper in full, here: Katrina L Kezios et al, Changes in financial well-being and memory function and decline in middle-aged and older adults ← if you want to read more than just the abstract, you just need to click on the PDF icon!

This is consistent, by the way, with the impact of systemic stress on heart health, which we wrote about here: Heart Health vs Systemic Stress

…and you’ll recall that “what’s good for your heart is good for your brain“, so, do note that the inverse is also true (what’s bad for your heart is bad for your brain)!

See also: What’s Your Vascular Dementia Risk? ← includes actual numbers and a risk calculator tool and things like that 😎

Want to learn more?

You might like this book that we reviewed a while ago:

Growing Young – by Marta Zaraska ← discusses the social factors involved in healthy aging

Take care!