Associations between lower socioeconomic position and worse cardiovascular health are apparent from midchildhood, with body mass index mediating 12% to 100% of some cardiovascular health differences.
Children aged 12 years in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods had higher pulse-wave velocity compared to those in the most advantaged neighborhoods.
Sixteen-year-olds whose mothers had the lowest education levels had higher triglycerides than those whose mothers had the highest education levels.
Associations between lower socioeconomic position and worse cardiovascular health were apparent from approximately age 12 years but not clearly present at younger ages.
Hypothetically intervening on body mass index would reduce between 12% and 100% of some observed cardiovascular health differences associated with socioeconomic position.
Three distinct dimensions of early life socioeconomic position were examined as exposures: neighborhood disadvantage, household socioeconomic position, and maternal education.
The study concluded that prevention efforts should address intermediate mechanisms such as BMI as well as upstream neighborhood, household, and maternal factors.
This research suggests that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds begin showing measurable differences in cardiovascular health as early as age 12, well before adulthood. The study analyzed data from over 21,000 children across five birth cohort studies in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Finland. It found that factors like living in a disadvantaged neighborhood, lower household socioeconomic status, and lower maternal education were linked to worse measures of heart and blood vessel health — including stiffer arteries (measured by pulse-wave velocity) and higher blood fat levels (triglycerides) — in children aged 12 to 18 years, but these differences were not clearly apparent in younger children (ages 4 and 9). The study also found that a child's body weight (measured by BMI) may explain somewhere between 12% and 100% of the cardiovascular health gap seen between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, depending on the specific outcome and cohort examined. This suggests that BMI is an important but not exclusive pathway through which socioeconomic disadvantage affects children's cardiovascular health. This research matters because it shows that the well-known link between poverty and heart disease does not begin in adulthood — signs are already visible in the early teenage years. This implies that efforts to prevent cardiovascular disease need to start early in life and should target not only individual health behaviors like diet and physical activity, but also broader social conditions such as neighborhood environments, family economic circumstances, and maternal education levels.
Gamage K, Pätsi S, Chen T, Mooney K, Sebert S, Priest N, et al.. (2026). Socioeconomic Position in Early Life and Childhood Cardiovascular Health Measures: An International Cross-Cohort Study.. Journal of the American Heart Association. https://doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.125.047846