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If the headlines in the science sections of newspapers (not to mention the daily topics on the Dr. Oz Show) are any indication, people are interested in factors that are associated with a long life.
There are a few well-known factors, of course. Women live longer than men. Nonsmokers live longer than smokers. What other factors predict whether someone will live longer?
A paper by Stephen Aichele, Patrick Rabbitt, and Paolo Gisletta in the April, 2016 issue of Psychological Science explored this question by analyzing the data from a long-term study of people in the UK.
This study tracked middle-aged and older adults over a 29 year period. They were given questionnaires asking about a variety of behaviors (including leisure activities and housework) as well as health-related behaviors (like smoking and alcohol use). Participants were asked subjective questions about how they felt and their health. They gave information about factors like marital status, occupation, number of children, and mood.
In addition, participants completed several cognitive tests at 4-year intervals. These tests included measures of intelligence, memory, and processing speed. The processing speed tasks looked at how quickly people could do things like search for a target on a computer screen and how quickly they could answer simple questions.
What were the biggest predictors longevity? As you might expect, among the five top predictors were being female (rather than male), being free of illness, and having relatively fewer years as a smoker. The most significant predictor of longevity was actually people’s subjective feeling about how healthy they were. That is, people who feel healthy generally are healthy and they live longer than those people who don’t feel healthy.
Interestingly, the other factor that was in the top 5 predictors of longevity was people’s change in cognitive processing speed over time. When people’s cognitive processing speed dropped, they were more likely to die. People whose processing speed remained relatively constant were more likely to live longer.
Other measures of cognitive ability (including intelligence and changes in intelligence) were not strong predictors of longevity. In addition, many other demographic variables including marital status and social interactions were not strongly related to how long people live.
What does this mean?
It does not mean that fast processing speed causes people to live longer. Instead, it is useful to think about your ability to think quickly as an indicator of your overall health. When you can think fast, then your brain is relatively free of damage. You are also able to coordinate the activity of different parts of your brain in ways that allow you to process information fluently.
So, processing speed is a great indicator of your overall health. If processing speed drops over a period of years, that probably reflects significant health problems. This study is valuable, because it is fairly easy to get measures of processing speed. You can give people a few tasks to perform that do not take long to administer. These tests may provide health-care professionals with valuable information about you.
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