[...] Dr. Robert S. Wilson of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and several colleagues reported in the January issue of Neurology that there was a clear correlation between a proneness to distress and the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's.
He didn't propose any causal relationship. But when a scientist says it's just a correlation, I always imagine George Costanza saying to Jerry Seinfeld, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."
George's character, by the way, is a nice example of pessimism, and worry. Larry David, the star of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," helped invent George, based on his own personality. Both George and Mr. David illustrated that there was at least one benefit to looking on the dark side. Expecting the worst can make for a lot of laughs.
What Dr. Wilson studied was not pessimism but distress proneness, which is not exactly worry, but something like it. The study involved about 1,000 people studied over six years. Even correcting for other factors like genes known to increase susceptibility to Alzheimer's, it turned out that those likely to be distressed were more likely to develop the disease than the others.
The effect was less strong in African-Americans than in whites. Dr. Wilson noted that "African-Americans have been disproportionately exposed to social conditions considered to be stressful" but said this did not explain the differences. Nor did he find any significant racial differences in general emotional states or proneness to distress. [...]
| Heh-heh-heh, James Gorman's registration-required New York Times article is titled "The Benefits of Looking on the Dark Side"
Here's a link to that Neurology magazine's abstract, which says "[p]ersons without dementia residing in a biracial community completed a brief scale of proneness to psychological distress, and 1,064 were subsequently examined for incident Alzheimer disease (AD) 3 to 6 years later. In analyses controlling for selected demographic and clinical variables, persons prone to distress were 2.4 times more likely to develop AD than persons not distress prone. This effect was substantially stronger in white persons compared to African Americans." Which, you know, is actually interesting.
Here's a link to an American Academy of Neurology press release that references an earlier Wilson-linked study that found "people who tend to experience psychological distress are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than people who are less prone to experience distress."
If I were really smart, the article's mention of "Seinfeld" would spur me to link to something about television ratings differences among black and white viewers (like, say, Clarence Lusane's "Assessing the disconnect between black and white television audiences: the race, class and gender politics of 'Married ... With Children," Alvin E. Poussaint's "Why is Television So Segregated?" or Douglas Gomery's American Journalism Review article "The Luster is in the Cluster," which mentions how "[a] February 1998 study by TN Media highlighted the disparity: While 'Seinfeld' was the top-rated show among whites, it ranked a mere 54th in popularity for African-American audiences. By contrast, Fox's 'Living Single' came in second with black audiences, but ranked 115th in white households").
If I were really, really smart (given how the second study's data came from "part of a larger study of older Catholic nuns, priests and brothers"), I'd link to something about blacks' baseline religiosity levels and faith-community participation.
posted in data on February 9, 2005 1:18 AM | t (0)
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