This one might be hard for your doctor to change.
Is your doctor going to work on your cynicism while also preventing your 33% dementia chance post-stroke from an Australian study
Is your doctor doing anything at all to prevent dementia?
This Personality Trait Could Triple Your Dementia Risk
The trait has already been linked with worse physical health, but what is it doing to the brain?
People with high levels of cynicism are more likely to develop dementia.
It’s already been found that those who believe others are mainly motivated by selfish concerns — the definition of cynical distrust — have worse physical health; for example, cynicism has been linked to heart disease.
Now you can add dementia to the list.
In the study, conducted in Finland, 1,449 people were given tests of their cynicism that included questions like:
- “I think most people would lie to get ahead.”
- “It is safer to trust nobody.”
- “Most people will use somewhat unfair reasons to gain profit or an advantage rather than lose it.”
The more people endorsed these statements, the stronger their cynical distrust was deemed to be.
They were also given tests of dementia and other factors that might affect their risk of developing dementia later on, like smoking and high cholesterol levels.
Eight years later, people were tested again to see if they had developed any symptoms of dementia.
The study was published in the journal Neurology (Neuvonen et al., 2014).
