(HealthDay)—Could your personality as a teen forecast your risk for dementia a half-century later?
Very possibly, say researchers, who found that dementia risk is lower among seniors who were calm, mature and energetic high schoolers.
“Being calm and mature as teen were each associated with roughly a 10% reduction in adult dementia risk,” said study co-author Kelly Peters, principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research in Washington, D.C. “And vigor was associated with a 7% reduction.”
The finding has its origins in the 1960s, when more than 82,000 students in roughly 1,200 U.S. high schools took a personality test. More than 50 years later, their personality traits were compared to dementia diagnoses.
While…
