Longevity of poor people correlated with IQ

Posted on 17. March 2009 by Vince Giuliano

A reported large-scale population study by Scottish researchers indicates that longevity is highly correlated with childhood intelligence quotient, especially for people who grow up in poorer neighborhoods.  A thousand people were followed during a 70-year span.  During a 25 year interval  “— 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 reasons for this effect are not clear.  One possibility according to the study authors is that poorer people with lower childhood IQ lead more deprived lives and are more vulnerable to diseases and other causes of death.  Another possibility is that low childhood IQ combined with poverty was correlated with low childhood health in the first place leading to increased mortality.  I suggest a third possibility: that members of the higher IQ group had more willingness, commitment and capability to pay attention to their health and longevity and that this effect transcended socioeconomic class.

About Vince Giuliano

Being a follower, connoisseur, and interpreter of longevity research is my latest career, since 2007. I believe I am unique among the researchers and writers in the aging sciences community in one critical respect. That is, I personally practice the anti-aging interventions that I preach and that has kept me healthy, young, active and highly involved at my age, now 93. I am as productive as I was at age 45. I don’t know of anybody else active in that community in my age bracket. In particular, I have focused on the importance of controlling chronic inflammation for healthy aging, and have written a number of articles on that subject in this blog. In 2014, I created a dietary supplement to further this objective. In 2019, two family colleagues and I started up Synergy Bioherbals, a dietary supplement company that is now selling this product. In earlier reincarnations of my career. I was Founding Dean of a graduate school and a full University Professor at the State University of New York, a senior consultant working in a variety of fields at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Chief Scientist and C00 of Mirror Systems, a software company, and an international Internet consultant. I got off the ground with one of the earliest PhD's from Harvard in a field later to become known as computer science. Because there was no academic field of computer science at the time, to get through I had to qualify myself in hard sciences, so my studies focused heavily on quantum physics. In various ways I contributed to the Computer Revolution starting in the 1950s and the Internet Revolution starting in the late 1980s. I am now engaged in doing the same for The Longevity Revolution. I have published something like 200 books and papers as well as over 430 substantive.entries in this blog, and have enjoyed various periods of notoriety. If you do a Google search on Vincent E. Giuliano, most if not all of the entries on the first few pages that come up will be ones relating to me. I have a general writings site at www.vincegiuliano.com and an extensive site of my art at www.giulianoart.com. Please note that I have recently changed my mailbox to vegiuliano@agingsciences.com.
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