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Study
links IQ and affluence level to longevity By
Aaron Levin, Center for the
Advancement of Health,
Health
Behavior News Service By
following nearly 1,000 subjects during a 70-year span, Scottish
researchers have found that people with high IQs who reside in poor
neighborhoods lived longer than people in similar areas with low IQs,
while the intelligence score was not important for longevity for people
living in wealthy neighborhoods. “The significant interaction
found between IQ and deprivation suggests that IQ in childhood is less
important in terms of mortality for people who live in more affluent areas
in adulthood than for people who live in deprived areas,” says Carole L.
Hart, Ph.D., of the Their findings are published in
the September issue of Psychosomatic Medicine. The high-IQ individuals may have
lived long lives because they learned better health behaviors early in
life or because higher mental ability allowed them to better cope with
adverse situations over the years, the researchers suggest. The study examined results of the
Scottish Mental Survey, an intelligence test held The researchers then compared this
data to records from a group of medical studies of adults in Two of the Midspan studies
enrolled more than 24,000 working-age participants — including some born
in 1921. Hart’s team was able to match 938 of these subjects to their
mental ability scores on the 1932 test. Based on home neighborhood and
occupation, they then categorized the subjects according to deprivation
and social class. Finally, they used health and hospital records to
determine the causes and dates of death of this group over the next
quarter-century. Over those 25 years, 51 percent of
the men and 38 percent of the women in the study died. In simple terms,
there was a 17 percent greater chance of death for every 15 points of
lower childhood IQ. After adjusting for deprivation and social class, this
difference was reduced to 12 percent. These adjustments separated
socioeconomic effects from IQ and explained some, but not all, of the
differences associated with lower IQ. “The analysis by IQ, divided
into four groups, showed that it was the lowest group that had an
increased relative rate of all-cause mortality,” Hart says. She adds that there is still much
work to be done to explain the mechanisms by which childhood IQ is
reflected in death rates decades later. “It is possible that low
childhood IQ leads to adult deprivation, which in turn leads to earlier
death,” she says. But it is also true that low birth weight or adverse
circumstances in childhood lead to lower IQ at age 11 and also to poorer
health outcomes. Hart’s team will keep studying the combinations of data
provided by others starting 70 years ago and continuing to the present. Funding for the study was provided
by the Chief Scientist’s Office of the Scottish Executive.
Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
