Being outgoing and hard working can protect you from dementia, study finds

Your personality has a lot to do with determining whether you will develop dementia when you become older, a new medical study finds.

People who have a positive outlook on life, are more organized, hard-working, and show a relatively high degree of self-discipline are less likely to develop some form of dementia later in life, according to the study.

On the other hand, those who are unstable emotionally or tend to be moody are more likely to experience a decline in brain function when they become older.

The study found, too, that sliding closer to dementia or even Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed if a person becomes more socially interactive and less stressed even when they are older.

International study

Personality characteristics reflect lasting patterns of behavior and thinking, says lead author Dr. Tomiko Yoneda of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. The cumulative effect of these characteristics have an impact on the way in which people engage in healthy or unhealthy activities over the course of their lives.

As a result, these lifelong experiences make a person more or less susceptible to developing certain disorders or diseases, such as mild brain impairment, he adds. They also mean that some people are more able to resist changes in the brain that are related to aging and others are less able to do so.

The findings were reached in an international study that was conducted by researchers at the University of Victoria; Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; Rush University Medical Center in Chicago; and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

The researchers analyzed information from 1,954 people who took part in the Rush Memory and Aging Project, a study of older people who live in the greater Chicago metropolitan area and northeastern Illinois.

None of those who took part in the study were formally diagnosed with dementia at the start of the study. They were selected from church groups, retirement communities, and senior housing facilities starting in 1997. The information on the participants was gathered regularly from that time until the time of the study.

In the study the scientists rated people on personality characteristics and then tested those characteristics against the development of brain impairment later in life.

Three main groups

They divided the subjects of the study into three main groups:

• Those who scored high on conscientiousness.

These are people who have a positive outlook on life. They are diligent and hard-working. They tend to be organized, responsible, and directed toward achieving goals in life.

• Those who scored high on neuroticism.

These people have lower emotional stability. They tend toward anxiety, mood swings, self-doubt, depression, and other feelings that are negative.

• Those who scored high on being extroverts.

These people draw energy from being with other people. They direct their energy toward the outside world. They tend to be gregarious, enthusiastic, assertive, and talkative.

The researchers found that the group that scored high on conscientiousness along with those who scored low on neuroticism were less likely to move toward mild cognitive impairment later in life. The opposite also was true: Those who scored low on conscientiousness and high on neuroticism were more likely to have brain impairment when they were older.

No direct relationship was found between those who scored high on extroversion and brain impairment. Those who scored high on extroversion—along with those who scored low on neuroticism and high on conscientiousness—did tend to maintain normal brain functioning longer than the others, however.

Lived longer without impairment

Other findings:

• Participants who were aged 80 and who were more conscientious were estimated to live almost an additional two years longer without suffering brain impairment compared with those who were less conscientious.

• Those participants who were more extroverted were estimated to retain healthy brain function for about a year longer than the others.

• Those who were more neurotic lost at least a year of healthy brain function. This finding highlighted the harm that is associated with the long-term experience of perceived emotional instability and stress, Yoneda says.

• Those who took on a more positive outlook on life and became higher in extroversion and lower in neuroticism were more likely to recover some of the lost brain function. This finding suggests that positive personality characteristics might protect a person even after they start to develop dementia.

This finding also shows that being interactive socially can be beneficial and help to improve brain health even later in life, Yoneda notes.

• The researchers found no link between any of the personality characteristics and total life expectancy.

Most of the participants in the study were female and white as well as being highly educated. Further research is needed to test the findings in more diverse samples of older adults, the researchers say.

The study is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.