Growing up in poverty can have a spectrum of consequences for a person’s status and future opportunities – and it can also make someone more likely to catch colds later in life, a new study shows.
Writing in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity, Carnegie Mellon University psychologist Sheldon Cohen and colleagues say they’ve found a connection between childhood poverty and a middle age with more sniffles, coughs and sneezes.
"We have found initial evidence for a biological explanation of the importance of childhood experiences on adult health," Cohen said in a statement. "The association we found in young and midlife adults suggests why those raised by parents of relatively low socioeconomic status may be at increased risk for disease throughout adulthood."
The main culprit seems to be telomeres, which are strings of repetitive DNA at the end of a person’s chromosomes. Think of them kind of like the plastic cap on the end of your shoelace – except even more important. Telomeres help protect genes from natural degradation, but they get shorter and shorter every time your cells divide. Shorter telomeres are thought to play a big role in aging and poor health.
Cohen and the team recruited 152 healthy people for their study. To place people on the socioeconomic ladder, the researchers asked participants if they currently owned their own home, and also whether their parents had owned a home during the participant’s childhood. The scientists also drew blood from the subjects in order to examine the telomere lengths of white blood cells from each person. Then, they exposed the participants to the common cold virus, then quarantined them for five days to see if they developed full-fledged symptoms.
Participants that grew up in lower-income homes were both likelier to have caught the cold and to have shorter telomeres. On average, for each year a person’s parents did not own a home during the participant’s childhood, their telomere lengths decreased by five percent and their chances of developing a cold after virus exposure were boosted by nine percent.
"This provides valuable insight into how our childhood environments can influence our adult health," said Cohen.
This latest paper builds off of one of Cohen’s previous studies, published this past February in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In that study, Cohen and colleagues found that telomere length is a good predictor of a person’s ability to fight off colds in young adulthood and middle age. The association only starts to hold weight starting at around age 22, but increases more and more throughout life. As a person gets older and older their telomeres get even shorter, thanks to more and more years of their cells dividing.
"Our work suggests the possibility that telomere length is a relatively consistent marker across the life span and that it can start predicting disease susceptibility in young adulthood," Cohen said in February.
SOURCE: Cohen et al. “Childhood socioeconomic status, telomere length, and susceptibility to upper respiratory infection.” Brain, Behavior and Immunity 34: 31-38, November 2013.
Poverty In Childhood Makes You More Susceptible To Colds Later In Life: Study
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