Study: Trauma from climate disaster can change brain function

Trauma from environmental and climate disasters can cause long-term changes in cognitive functioning, according to research published Wednesday in the journal PLOS Climate.

Researchers from the University of California San Diego and California State University used existing data from survivors of the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history. In the 2023 study, researchers found that among a subset of people directly exposed to the fire, electroencephalography (EEG) scans showed noticeable differences in brain activity and cognitive function.

Much of the existing body of research on climate change-fueled disasters and their effects focuses on more subjective, self-reported impacts like mood or stress disorders, co-author Jyoti Mishra, an associate psychiatry professor at UCSD, told The Hill.

“We actually wanted to see if there are any objective cognitive and brain function changes that are seen in individuals who are exposed to the fires,” she said. “And we find that indeed, there are specific cognitive differences relative to a control population that was never exposed to the fires.”

Those differences, she said, include variations in interference processing activity that indicated the survivors of the fire were more prone to distractibility, a phenomenon they observed in both those directly exposed to the fire and those indirectly exposed. People exposed to the fire also indicated higher frontal-lobe activity, suggesting they need to exert more effort to process information.

The specific data for the study, Mishra said, applies only to the wildfires, but researchers suspect similar effects would apply to survivors of other natural disasters. “I would think the distress that climate related trauma causes on our mental health would end up showing these kinds of changes in other disaster situations as well,” she said.

Much of the toll from disasters is still traditionally measured in terms of property damage, injuries and lives lost, she said, and its impact on mental health needs further study.

“I think mental health has been overlooked for a long time in this context,” she said. “The objective findings that we have, in terms of the cognitive and brain function changes, they are striking in that they appear even six months to a year after the first disaster actually hit. So the communities are living, in this case, with changes in their physiology that are long-lasting and coping with that stress on a daily basis.”