Racism is not just dangerous for your mental and emotional health; it can age your brain. A new study from the Journal of the American Medical Association found that “repeated exposure to racial discrimination has been associated with a greater incidence of brain health disorders.” It also determined that “racial discrimination contributes to accelerated biological aging via altered connectivity.”
Study Findings
The study found that epigenetic aging can be impacted by exposure to racism. Epigenetic aging presents a precise picture of how one’s cells are aging instead of chronological age. There are considerable disparities in the rate at which Black people are diagnosed with certain brain health disorders, including Alzheimer’s Dementia. “Epidemiologic studies suggest that Black individuals have a 2-fold greater risk of Alzheimer’s dementia compared with White individuals; racial discrimination has been indicated as a contributing factor,” according to information obtained from a 2019 study by the Alzheimer’s & Dementia, the Alzheimer’s Association.
Theories on the impact of systemic racism on many aspects of healthcare are widely accepted.
Racism as a Public Health Crisis
In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared racism a legitimate public health crisis. The negative results of racism are sometimes referred to as weathering. Previously, “Emerging neuroimaging research has shown that racial discrimination affects brain function and structure,” in a 2022 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It found that “racial discrimination may lead to a proportionately greater response and connectivity in brain networks involved with threat processing and emotion regulation” as a result of the sustained exposure to the trauma racism embeds into the bodies it seeks to diminish. Other studies have highlighted genetic predispositions passed down as a result of this enduring trauma, including the “altered connectivity of the amygdala and anterior insula.” Those findings held even after the information was effectively adjusted for socioeconomic status. This dispels that all it takes is improvements in financial equity to overcome risk factors.
The results of these studies are not dependent on the racist encounters being connected to macro-aggressions or micro-aggressions specifically.
How Codeswitching Factors In
In a 2024 interview with NPR, Negar Fani, a clinical neuroscientist at Emory University evaluating individuals with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, and Nate Harnett, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, suggested the adaptability required to self-regulate emotions with coping methods like codeswitching could contribute to the potential degradation of brain health. Their hypothesis pondered whether constantly finding measured responses to a series of harmless hair touches or casual epithets can erode one’s brain health over time.
The pair worked on a 2021 study researching their theories.
The Journal of Biological Psychiatry Published their study, which reported that “experiences of racial discrimination were associated with significantly lower fractional anisotropy in multiple white matter tracts, including the corpus callosum, cingulum, and superior longitudinal fasciculus.” The statistical variations in this study remained “even after accounting for variance associated with trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder, and demographic- and scanner-related factors.”
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to the brain,” Harnett told NPR. “Energy has to come from somewhere. And what we think ends up happening is, you know, an energy that’s reserved for other processes then gets taken away.”
While there has been a rise in the visibility of studies connecting systemic racism to health issues, there has not been an adequate amount of peer-reviewed studies. “Despite numerous studies highlighting the associations between racial discrimination exposure and negative brain health outcomes, few empirical studies have examined racial discrimination–related neurobiological mechanisms that may underlie these outcomes,” according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Identifying how racism impacts the mind and body is essential to learning how to treat its effects in the future.
