Psychology
Conscientiousness can help us live longer, but are there other ways of forecasting our demise?
Conscientiousness can help us live longer, but are there other ways of forecasting our demise?
I’ve written previously that our personality can predict our chances of shuffling off this mortal coil, but only to the extent that if you are, for example, unconscientious, it means that your chances of dying on any given day are higher. I want to know whether I’m going to die in a month or a year. This is a great question and one with considerable practical implications. And I suspect insurance companies have complicated algorithms to try to tease out the answer.
What kind of data would we need to be able to answer it, though? I could ask a bunch of folks, preferably enough of them to provide the “statistical power” to make meaningful predictions, then count back from when they die to see if what they’ve told me might consistently predict their deaths.
But it’s even trickier than that – life is complicated and myriad things affect mortality. Some people smoke or vape, but others don’t. Some take great pleasure in a hearty (beef) steak of an evening, whereas others enjoy a good (cauliflower) steak on the barbie. I enjoy drinking my own home brew, but others are dry.
All these factors and many others affect our health and increase or mitigate the risks of death. In terms of research design, we can cope with this by including them all in our study design, but that also adds complexity, because we need to know a lot more things about our participants, and we may need even more of them to give us that statistical power.
The other approach we could take is to find a group of people whose lifestyles are more similar to one another’s than they are different. No, I’m not thinking of a prison, although that might offer some hope. Diet is probably fairly standard for a community sharing penal mealtimes, but television prison dramas lead me to think that smoking and toilet distilleries might still mean less than optimal lifestyle factors at play, and you can’t rely on participants not to get paroled. We really need lives without parole, preferably out of choice.
One solution is, perhaps surprisingly, to get thee to a nunnery. Or an abbey. Thanks to the kinds of stable, life-stylistically homogeneous populations that inhabit nunneries and abbeys, we can more confidently identify that one thing that definitely predicts the slippery slope towards the grave is a decline in cognitive function – memory and visual and motor capability.
Robert Wilson, at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, is a pioneer of just such a research project. For about 25 years, he has worked on the Religious Orders Study, a longitudinal Alzheimer’s and dementia research project involving nuns, monks and priests in Minnesota. This and other studies suggest cognitive decline starts, on average, slightly more than three years before death, assuming everyone starts at the same baseline
One thing that definitely predicts the slippery slope towards the grave is a decline in cognitive function.
of showing no evidence of dementia.
Subsequent studies with the same group suggest this holds across age, gender and education. It’s less obvious in people with cardiovascular problems (whose mortality is more likely to be explained by those issues) and is also dramatically less likely among people without a particular allele – a gene variant that’s associated with Alzheimer’s. Not everyone who has a copy of this allele gets Alzheimer’s, but there is a clear link.
What this grab bag of statistics tells us is that increasing difficulty finding your marbles is, in Wilson’s words, “more strongly associated with impending mortality than advancing age”. I’m not sure if I should find this reassuring or not.
The prescription is to live a healthy life. Things such as listening to and making music, exercise, meditation and sleep are cheap and evidence-based ways to stave off the cognitive reaper.