The poor have been shown to have higher levels of cortisol
There are many stressors involved in poverty:
- Poverty can bring many physical stressors
- Poverty can bring many psychological stressors
- The poor are less able to plan for the future and can only respond to present stressors
- The poor have less outlets to help deal with stress
- The poor lack social support
All these hardships suggest that low socioeconomic status (SES—typically measured by a combination of income, occupation, housing conditions, and education) should be associated with chronic activation of the stress-response. Only a few studies have looked at this, but they support this view.
One concerned school kids in Montreal, a city with fairly stable communities and low crime. In six-and eight-year-old children, there was already a tendency for lower-SES kids to have elevated cortisol levels. By age ten, there was a step-wise gradient, with low-SES kids averaging almost double the circulating cortisol as the highest SES kids. Another example concerns people in Lithuania. In 1978, men in Lithuania, then part of the USSR, had the same mortality rates for heart disease as did men in nearby Sweden. By 1994, following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Lithuanians had four times the Swedish rate. In 1994 Sweden, SES was not related to cortisol levels, whereas in 1994 Lithuania, it was strongly related.
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers Chapter 17. The View from the Bottom (p. 512). New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Economics Status:☀️