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May 28, 2011
People who identify as “born-again” Christians tend to have smaller brains than mainline Protestants, according to a new study conducted by Duke University Medical Center.
Participants in the study, all them 58 or older, were initially recruited for a larger study on the effects of depression in the elderly. But researchers discovered that those claiming to have had “born-again” experiences had considerable shrinkage or atrophy in the hippocampal region of the brain. The hippocampus is an area that helps to regulate emotion and memory, and atrophy in this region of the brain is linked to mental health problems such as depression, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers found that Roman Catholics and people without any religious affiliation also had shrinkage in the hippocampus.
The study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Templeton Foundation, included at least two MRI measurements between 1994 and 2005 of 268 participants.
Researchers speculated the results might be related to the stress of belonging to a minority group. Chronic stress floods the brain with hormones that can damage the hippocampus.
Amy Owen, a psychologist who did a post-doctoral fellowship at Duke and was the main writer for the study, told USA TODAY she hoped other researchers would try to reproduce the study or offer reasons for the association.
“There may be more factors responsible for the correlation,” she said of the study published on March 30 in PLoS One, a peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication.
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