Where You Live Could Shape How You Forget: New Study Links Neighborhood Poverty to Memory Decline in Midlife Women

Wednesday, July 23, 2025.

In America, we’re used to zip codes determining your access to decent groceries, decent schools, or decent sidewalks.

But a new study suggests your zip code might also help decide how quickly you forget where you put your keys—or worse, your memories.

Published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, this large longitudinal study finds that women living in neighborhoods surrounded by high levels of poverty experience accelerated memory decline during midlife.

And for Black women, the effect was even more pronounced.

It’s not just where you live. It’s where your neighbors live. And their neighbors. Poverty, it seems, is not just contagious—it’s cumulative.

The Setup: Midlife Women and the Architecture of Forgetting

The researchers tracked 1,391 women aged 49–60, drawn from seven U.S. regions (Ann Arbor, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Jersey City, Pittsburgh, and Alameda/Contra Costa counties), over nearly 14 years as part of the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN).

These women weren’t patients or residents of nursing homes. They were your coworkers, neighbors, cousins. And over time, their minds told a quietly devastating story.

The team, led by Jinshil Hyun of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, wasn't interested in vague notions of “brain fog.”

They went after episodic memory—the kind that helps you remember what your daughter said this morning or where you left your wallet. And they measured it using repeated cognitive tests, looking specifically at both immediate and delayed recall.

What they found was stark: Women in high-poverty “hot spot” neighborhoods lost episodic memory at a rate 7% faster per decade than their wealthier-area counterparts. For Black women, the decline in delayed recall jumped to nearly 10%.

That’s not just a statistic. That’s the difference between remembering your mother’s voice and losing it.

Why This Study Matters More Than the Average “Poor Neighborhoods Are Bad” Report

Lots of research has linked poverty to poor health. So what?

But most of it treats neighborhoods like islands—little postage stamps of deprivation, measured by the poverty rate in your immediate census tract.

But what this study did differently was zoom out.

They examined whether a woman’s entire surrounding area was saturated with poverty.

If you live in a poor neighborhood but you’re surrounded by wealthier tracts—parks, clinics, good transit—maybe you can still access what you need.

But if you're encircled by poverty? It’s like being stuck in a food desert for the mind.

And crucially, they didn’t just take a snapshot.

They tracked how women moved, how their neighborhoods changed, and how those changes shaped their cognitive trajectories.

It’s a cartography of memory loss, mapped in real time.

Brain Health as a Neighborhood Effect

Importantly, the study didn’t just lump “cognition” into one big bucket. It looked at three specific areas:

• Episodic Memory (memory for events and experiences).

• Processing Speed (how fast your brain runs the numbers).

• Working Memory (mental sticky notes for the present).

Here’s what they found:

• Episodic memory was uniquely vulnerable to poverty’s squeeze. Women in high-concentration poverty zones declined faster—and this remained true even after adjusting for education, smoking, physical activity, menopause, alcohol use, and heart health.

• Processing speed and working memory were lower at baseline for women in poorer neighborhoods—but their rates of decline over time weren’t significantly different.

In plain English: poverty sets your cognitive starting point lower, and in the case of memory, makes the slope steeper too.

Why Black Women Were Hit Hardest

The most pronounced declines were found in Black women living in high-poverty areas, especially in delayed recall, which is one of the earliest cognitive faculties to falter in Alzheimer’s disease.

This isn’t just about income or education.

The researchers suggest it’s about layered disadvantage: living in under-resourced neighborhoods, enduring chronic stress, experiencing discrimination, and being systematically excluded from environments that support health.

In other words, you can’t yoga your way out of redlining.

What Explains the Memory Decline?

Researchers considered cardiovascular health, physical activity, and other lifestyle factors. But these didn’t fully account for the disparities. That leaves several likely suspects:

• Chronic stress, which can shrink the hippocampus (your memory’s home base).

• Environmental toxins, like lead, air pollution, and noise.

• Cognitive understimulation, or as I like to call it, the “no library, no latte, no brain gym” effect.

It’s not just what’s in your fridge. It’s what’s outside your window.

The Big Philosophical Gut Punch

There’s something chilling about realizing that poverty has a half-life inside the brain, a way of echoing through the very tissues that house identity, language, and love.

This study offers a terrifying glimpse into how geographic inequality becomes biological destiny—and how that destiny unfolds quietly, across dinner tables, across decades.

And because this decline is happening in midlife, not old age, it suggests that interventions can’t wait for retirement.

By the time someone qualifies for Medicare, it may already be too late.

Limitations and Next Steps

• Sample Bias: Mostly urban areas. We don’t yet know how this plays out in rural America.

• Life-Course Exposure: The study didn’t measure where participants grew up, which may shape later brain health.

• Activity Spaces: It focused on where women lived, not where they worked, socialized, or found meaning.

• Mechanisms Still Unclear: We don’t know exactly which neighborhood features (greenspace? noise? violence?) are the biggest culprits.

But the next phase of research is promising: Hyun and colleagues are now using GPS data to track how people actually move through their environments. This emerging research will offer a deeper map of exposure, constraint, and community resilience, or its absence.

Final Thought: A New Kind of Dementia Prevention

Alzheimer’s doesn’t start with a PET scan.

It starts with a lack of sidewalks, broken transit, substandard housing, and years of scraping by without enough to feed your brain—or your hope.

If you’re looking for a national Alzheimer’s prevention strategy, you might want to start with some old-school urban planning.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Hyun, J., Schiff, M., Hall, C. B., Appelhans, B. M., Barinas-Mitchell, E., Thurston, R. C., Karvonen-Gutierrez, C. A., Hedderson, M. M., Janssen, I., & Derby, C. A. (2025). Exposure to neighborhood concentrated poverty is associated with faster decline in episodic memory among midlife women. Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association. https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.13993