36 LISTENER MARCH 14 2020
THIS LIFE
G
ETTYIMAGESI
’ve written previously that our personal-
ity can predict our chances of shuffling
off this mortal coil, but only to the extent
that if you are, for example, unconscien-
tious, it means that your chances of dying
on any given day are higher. I want to
know whether I’m going to die in a month
or a year. This is a great question and one with
considerable practical implications. And I sus-
pect insurance companies have complicated
algorithms to try to tease out the answer.
What kind of data would we need to
be able to answer it, though? I could ask a
bunch of folks, preferably enough of them to
provide the “statistical power” to make mean-
ingful predictions, then count back from
when they die to see if what they’ve told me
might consistently predict their deaths.
But it’s even trickier than that – life is compli-
cated and myriad things affect mortality. Some
people smoke or vape, but others don’t. Some
take great pleasure in a hearty (beef) steak of
an evening, whereas others enjoy a good
(cauliflower) steak on the barbie. I
enjoy drinking my own home brew,
but others are dry.
All these factors and many
others affect our health and
increase or mitigate the risks
of death. In terms of research
design, we can cope with this
by including them all in our
study design, but that also adds
complexity, because we need to
know a lot more things about
our participants, and we may
need even more of them to give
us that statistical power.
The other approach we couldDying
to know
Conscientiousness can
help us live longer, but
are there other ways of
forecasting our demise?
take is to find a group of people
whose lifestyles are more similar to
one another’s than they are differ-
ent. No, I’m not thinking of a prison,
although that might offer some hope.
Diet is probably fairly stand-
ard for a community sharing
penal mealtimes, but televi-
sion prison dramas lead me to
think that smoking and toilet
distilleries might still mean less
than optimal lifestyle factors at
play, and you can’t rely on par-
ticipants not to get paroled. We
really need lives without parole,
preferably out of choice.
One solution is, perhaps
surprisingly, to get thee to a
nunnery. Or an abbey. Thanks
to the kinds of stable, life-stylisti-
cally homogeneous populations
that inhabit nunneries and
abbeys, we can more confidently
identify that one thing that
definitely predicts the slipperyslope towards the grave is a decline
in cognitive function – memory
and visual and motor capability.R
obert Wilson, at Rush Uni-
versity Medical Center in
Chicago, is a pioneer of just
such a research project. For about 25
years, he has worked on the Reli-
gious Orders Study, a longitudinal
Alzheimer’s and dementia research
project involving nuns, monks and
priests in Minnesota. This and other
studies suggest cognitive decline
starts, on average, slightly more than
three years before death, assuming
everyone starts at the same baselineby Marc Wilson
PSYCHOLOGY
One thing that
definitely predicts theslippery slope towards
the grave is a declinein cognitive function.
Clues to impending death:
members of religious
orders are good study
participants because of
their similar lifestyle habits.