According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 55 million people around the globe currently suffer from dementia – a general term for diseases of the mind that affect memory and cognition, typically towards the end of someone’s life.
For decades, finding out what people who are diagnosed with the disease have in common, or what they don’t, has left health experts scratching their heads.
That's because dementia is complex and its causes are multifaceted, but an emerging line of research is pointing towards a surprising commonality: who you are as a person and how you view the world could be a missing piece of the puzzle.
In other words, experts think your personality is an important risk factor that most of us are unaware of.
Having analysed data from multiple studies totalling 44,000 participants, researchers recently published their findings in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association. What they found was a strong link between people’s personality traits and not just their risk of dementia, but also their resilience to the pathology of the disease.
Conscientiousness is key
To find out whether personality is linked to dementia risk, scientists in the study investigated what’s known as the 'Big Five' personality traits. These are:
- Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness (being hard-working and goal-oriented).
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
They also assessed people’s subjective well-being; their life satisfaction, as well as how often they experience positive and negative emotions.
Multiple surveys are usually used to get an accurate picture of a participant's personality.
The team found that high scores on negative personality traits (negative affect and neuroticism) and lower scores on positive traits (extraversion, conscientiousness and positive affect) were associated with a higher risk of receiving a dementia diagnosis. The converse was true of lowering risk.
What's more, these weren’t small changes. “For example, a 10 per cent increase in conscientiousness score was associated with about 15 times lower odds of getting dementia, which is a pretty substantive difference,” Dr Emorie Beck – assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and lead author of the study – tells BBC Science Focus.
These results were somewhat expected. Having a positive personality is usually associated with having a healthier lifestyle, being more educated, less lonely and less stressed – all well-known mediators of dementia risk.
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However, there was a surprise hidden amongst the data. When performing autopsies on the brains of participants, characteristic signs of dementia (usually seen as ‘plaques’ on brain cells) had no association with personality traits.
In other words, personality seems to be able to protect a person from exhibiting symptoms of dementia even where the pathology is present in the brain. And so fostering these positive traits might make the brain more resilient to the disease itself.
How is it that two people with seemingly the same damage to the brain could display completely different symptoms just because their personalities were different?
Researchers aren’t sure exactly – Beck calls it “a puzzle that we're currently trying to unpack in other work” – but it highlights why dementia has been such a tough nut to crack in terms of understanding and treatment.
Why your personality can change
If you’re now feeling neurotic about the fact you’re neurotic or conscious of the fact you’re not conscientious, don’t fret.
“There was a long period of time where we thought of personality as immutable; that you’re stuck with your personality from birth. But that’s a pretty antiquated view,” Beck explains.
First of all, she points out that personalities change over time. As people age, they tend to become less neurotic and more conscientious. This makes sense, right? You have your chaotic, rule-breaking youth, and then slowly things calm down and become more orderly as life slots into place.
Still, some people maintain some negative traits into midlife, and anyone can be hit by bouts of negativity. Life is unpredictable, after all.
To become more conscientious and positive, Beck says, you can build good habits and routines. Surrounding yourself with people with positive traits can be useful too. For example, research shows that having a conscientious romantic partner can have positive impacts on one's health, extending life expectancy even if you are not very conscientious yourself.
“And then with neuroticism, there's really good evidence that just going to psychotherapy is associated with pretty huge decreases in those behaviours,” Beck says.
“My suggestion is to always start small. Start with one thing, like taking a 10-minute walk when you have your morning coffee. That’s a big change you can make to start building your life more conscientiously,” she concludes.
If you're interested in finding out what your Big Five personality traits are you can take tests online.
Emorie D Beck is an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on the question of what personality is, how it can change and what health effects this may have. Her work has been published in journals such as Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and The Handbook of Personality Dynamics and Processes.
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