Your personality in high school may help predict your risk of dementia decades later.
Researchers reached this conclusion using a 150-item personality inventory given to a national sample of teenagers in 1960. The survey assessed character traits — sociability, calmness, empathy, maturity, conscientiousness, self-confidence and others — using scores ranging from low to high. For their study, in JAMA Psychiatry, scientists linked the scores of 82,232 of the test-takers to Medicare data on diagnoses of dementia from 2011 to 2013.
They found that high extroversion, an energetic disposition, calmness and maturity were associated with a lower risk of dementia an average of 54 years later, though the association did not hold for students with low socioeconomic status.
Calmness and maturity have been linked to lower levels of stress, which may help explain the association. Lower socioeconomic status, which often increases chronic stress, may negate the apparent benefits of those personality traits.
“The study was not set up to discern a causal link,” said the lead author, Benjamin P. Chapman, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester. “Most likely these traits lead to all kinds of other things over 50 years that culminate in a diagnosis of dementia. We tried to rule out as many other factors as possible, but our findings are suggestive, and we don’t want to draw strong conclusions about causation.”