Positive attitude enhances life span: Study

Chicago, March 9: A latest study by U.S. researchers suggests that optimists lead longer and healthier lives as compared to pessimists.

Researchers from University of Pittsburgh assessed death rates and chronic health conditions in participants of the Women’s Health Initiative study that has tracked almost 100,000 women aged 50 and above since 1994.

The study claims that women with a positive outlook had 14 percent less chances of dying due to same reason as opposed to pessimists. Further, optimistic women were 30 percent less prone to suffering from heart problems and also unlikely to have high levels of blood pressure or blood sugar.

The research team headed by Dr. Hilary Tindle also examined women who showed little trust in other people. They named this group “cynically hostile” and weighed them against the more trusting women.

Tindle said that women belonging to the cynically hostile group often responded in the affirmative to questions such as “I’ve often had to take orders from someone who didn’t know as much as I did” or “It’s safest to trust nobody.”

Tindle remarked, “These questions prove a general mistrust of people. Cynically hostile women were 16 percent more likely to die (during the study period) compared to women who were the least cynically hostile. They were also 23 percent more likely to die from cancer.”

Regarding the link between negative attitude and its ill effects on health, Tindle said, “I think we really need more research to design therapies that will target people’s attitudes to see if they can be modified and if that modification is beneficial to health.”

As far as pessimists were concerned, Tindle said that they may think, “‘I’m doomed. There is nothing I can do,’ I’m not sure that’s true. We just don’t know.”

The current study was presented by Tindle at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society in Chicago.