An underappreciated but scientifically substantiated fact is that getting a good education, challenging your mind, maintaining friendships and staying socially active can also help reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's Dementia in later life. A new report in the American Medical Association journal, Archives of General Psychiatry, now compliments those findings in showing that simply having a sense of purpose in life can help to reduce this risk.
This new study was performed by Patricia Boyle, Ph.D and her group at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. The participants in the study were 951 men and women with an average age of 80.4 years, who had normal cognitive function at the start of the study. That is, none had yet shown signs of developing Alzheimer's Dementia. In the study they defined purpose in life as, "The psychological tendency to derive meaning from life's experiences and to possess a sense of intentionality and goal directedness that guides behavior." In other words, that your life means something and that you have a sense of control of it. They measured the sense of purpose in life by tallying up scores from a 10 item questionnaire that was given to the subjects in the test.
The questionnaire included questions such as: "I have a sense of direction and purpose in life", and " I sometimes feel as if I have done all there is to do in life." Participants answered questions on a scale of one to five, and agreement with optimistic, positive questions such as the first, added points while disagreement with the more pessimistic questions, such as the second one, also added points. They found that individuals with a sense of purpose at the start of the study were less likely to develop Alzheimer's Dementia over the following seven years. In fact, it was shown that people with the lowest sense of purpose in life were more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's Dementia than those with the highest sense of purpose. The authors of the study recognized that factors such as depression, education, number of friends and family, gender, and race can and do affect ones risk for developing Alzheimer's Dementia. These factors were measured and analyzed in the study. They determined that even when all of these other important social and psychological factors were considered, a simple sense of purpose in life made its own unique, and statistically significant contribution to reducing the risk of Alzheimer's Dementia.