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Personality and All-Cause Mortality Among Older Adults Dwelling in a Japanese Community: A Five-Year Population-Based Prospective Cohort Study

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Objective

Personality is an important factor in determining longevity. It has been reported that some personality traits can affect mortality via health-related behaviors, engaging in social interactions, and a tendency to experience negative emotions. The authors examined the relationships between five major domains of personality traits and all-cause mortality among Japanese community-dwelling elderly.

Design

A 5-year prospective cohort study design with mortality surveillance.

Setting

Community based.

Participants

A total sample of 486 men and 742 women aged 65 years and over at the baseline.

Measurements

The NEO five-factor inventory was administered to assess the “big five” personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Results

During the 5-year follow-up period, 127 persons (73 men and 54 women) died. In Cox multivariate proportional hazards models adjusted for gender, age, number of years of education, living alone, presence of psychiatric problems, and presence of chronic diseases, conscientiousness (risk ratio [RR] = 0.50, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.33–0.76 and RR = 0.46, 95% CI = 0.29 to 0.71, for the middle and highest tertiles, respectively), extraversion (RR = 0.58, 95% CI = 0.37 to 0.92, for the highest tertile), and openness (RR = 0.62, 95% CI = 0.41 to 0.96, for the middle tertile) were independently and inversely associated with all-cause mortality. Neither neuroticism nor agreeableness was related to mortality.

Conclusions

Our results suggest that out of the five domains of personality traits, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness are reliable predictors of all-cause mortality among community-dwelling elderly.

Section snippets

Participants

The source of data for the present study was the Longitudinal Interdisciplinary Study on Aging conducted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology.25, 26 The study aimed to clarify longitudinal changes in psychological and physical functions among middle-aged and elderly people dwelling in communities, and to explore healthy life styles and ways of coping with many of the challenges of old age (for example, stressful life events, chronic diseases, disabilities, and bereavement). The

RESULTS

After 5 years, of the 1,228 adults, 127 (10.3%, 73 men and 54 women) had died and 24 people (1.9%, 7 men and 17 women) had moved away from the target region and were lost to follow-up.

Table 1 shows the characteristics of the members in the follow-up cohort, collected in 2000, including age, proportion of women, number of years of education, proportion of living alone, presence of psychiatric problems, presence of chronic diseases, and the distribution of total scores of each personality scale.

DISCUSSION

Our study examined the association between the five major domains of personality traits and all-cause mortality among Japanese community-dwelling elderly, using a 5-year prospective cohort study design with mortality surveillance. Our findings indicate that, out of the five domains of personality traits, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness were associated with reduced mortality when adjusted for potential confounders.

Our results indicate that conscientiousness is a protective factor

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    This work was supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (No.16091216 and No.19790438).

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