Racial discrimination may increase stress, lead to health problems and hamper cognitive function for Black women, a new study finds.
Black women who frequently experienced daily racism — including racial slurs, poor store service or forms of stereotyping — had 2.75 times the risk of poor subjective cognitive functioning than women who experienced lower levels of daily racism.
Cognitive function refers to a person's mental capacity for learning, thinking, reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, remembering and paying attention.
The statistic is according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.
Those who encountered the greatest degrees of institutional racism — in regard to work, housing or police — were 2.66 times more likely to report poor cognitive functioning than women who experienced institutional racism less often.
The findings weren't "unexpected because we know that stressors have been related to poor cognitive function, and experiences of racism are very large stressors in the lives of African Americans," said Lynn Rosenberg, the senior author of the study, an epidemiologist at the Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University and a professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health.
Rates of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, conditions which inhibit cognitive abilities, are higher in Black people. Instances of racism have been linked with conditions that increase risk for impaired cognition, including depression and poor sleep — so the researchers thought that frequent experiences of racism among Black women might negatively affect their subjective abilities to critically think, understand, follow conversations or navigate.
"Depression and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) can have long-term cognitive effects," said Dr. Danielle Hairston, a psychiatrist and assistant professor in the Howard University College of Medicine, who wasn't involved in the study.
"The emotional experience of psychological trauma (like racism) can alter cognitive processes such as memory, attention, planning, and problem solving," said Hairston, who is also the president of the Black Caucus of the American Psychiatric Association, in an email.
"Racism is a source of stress and depression, so I would expect that racism can negatively impact cognitive functioning."
Prejudice and cognitive health
The study included 17,323 women from the Black Women's Health Study, which was established in 1995. The longitudinal study's goal was to understand what drives the higher rates of diseases among Black women and what would improve their health.
While in their mid-40s in 2009, the women answered questions about experiencing daily and institutional racism. Among their daily experiences, they reported receiving worse service than others in restaurants and stores, being treated as if they were unintelligent and experiencing that other people feared them.
