And no, this does not mean I will suddenly start writing about the big comparative study the OECD will publish today at 9.30 a.m. You will also be able to read all sorts of things about it here. By the way, it is just a little strange to be sitting here writing something when the big news will follow shortly. But perhaps that makes it all the more interesting to pause and consider something else. For example, how worrying about money is linked to our brains and cognitive abilities as we grow older.

This blog post is about new research by Liu et al. (2026), Persistent financial adversity and cognitive aging: a life course investigation, published in Innovation in Aging. They use the famous British 1946 birth cohort (2,759 participants). For a smaller group, the researchers used brain scans later in life (n ≈ 356–468). This is fewer than the hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds who took part in PISA, but pretty impressive for a cohort study.

The researchers had information about participants’ financial situations at different points between ages 26 and 53. They then looked at both low income and financial difficulties. The latter is the experience of finding it difficult to make ends meet with the money available. This can happen with most budgets when the month turns out to be longer than your salary. They could then link this information to cognitive tests from the age of 53 onwards. For a smaller group, brain scans were also available at around age 70.

What did they find? People who had experienced low income for longer periods or reported financial difficulties scored lower, on average, at age 53 on measures such as verbal memory and processing speed. The longer the financial adversity lasted, the clearer the association generally became. You might now think: there you go, money worries make your brain age faster. That was my first thought too. In a way it is true, but it is still a little more complicated.

People who had experienced long-term financial difficulties did not suddenly show faster cognitive decline afterward. For verbal memory, the researchers even found slower decline. Do realise that this last finding is not really good news. These people had already started at a lower level at age 53. However, the reason for this may not be that their cognitive functions deteriorate faster after middle age. The reason is that they were already  capable of doing less.

Moreover, the scans showed some hints of a possible association as well. For instance, having low income for a longer period was associated with greater ventricular volume at age 70. I had no idea what this meant, but apparently it could mean more brain atrophy, i.e., a reduction in brain volume. By the way, there were more pronounced associations among men, individuals who came from unfavorable socioeconomic background, and people carrying genetic variants for Alzheimer’s disease. Some people get all the bad luck.

Still, an important warning is needed again. Despite the enormous dataset, this is still an observational study. Of course, it could hardly be otherwise. The researchers obviously did not randomly make people poor or rich and then follow them for forty years. Income, education, occupation, health, and cognitive abilities influence one another throughout a person’s life. Even with an exceptionally rich dataset, you can never really untangle that knot.

So, the study does not show that money worries damage your brain. At the same time, we have similar evidence regarding the influence of worries on brain development in young children. In addition, the study shows that financial adversity in adulthood is still associated, decades later, with differences in cognition and brain structure.

All of this made me think, not cynically but rather melancholically: you can take a person out of poverty, but you cannot really take the poverty out of the person.