#Racism is giving black women serious memory problems: study

The experience of racism is hurting black people, body and mind.

Habitual racist interactions are linked to memory issues among African-American women, which may put them at a higher risk of developing neurological diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s, according to a new study by researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine.

Epidemiologists at BU compared responses from the Black Women’s Health Study, which has biodata from some 59,000 participants aged 21 to 69 years, about their experiences of racism as well as questions that examined memory and cognition. Their analysis showed that women who consistently reported the highest incidents of racist aggressions were 2.75 times more likely to demonstrate lower subjective cognitive function (SCF), in contrast to those who reported lower levels of daily racism.

Additionally, women who felt most affected by institutional racism risked poor SCF at 2.66 times the rate compared to their unaffected counterparts.

The results shed light on prior studies that show high rates of cognitive diseases among black Americans. Researchers hope to continue to explore this relationship, and whether exposure to racism accelerates disease onset or increases biomarkers for Alzheimers’s and dementia in the body.

Their findings have been posted online in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.

“Everyone is affected by stressors, but African-Americans have the additional heavy burden of the stress of racism,” said senior study author Lynn Rosenberg, a principal investigator of the Black Women’s Health Study.

She told Inverse, “Given the large literature documenting the harmful health effects of stressors, it should not be a leap for people to realize that racism has harmful health effects as well.”