Personality Predicts Mortality Risk: An Integrative Data Analysis of 15 International Longitudinal Studies.

This study examined the Big Five personality traits as predictors of mortality risk, and smoking as a mediator of that association. Replication was built into the fabric of our design: we used a Coordinated Analysis with 15 international datasets, representing 44,094 participants. We found that high neuroticism and low conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness were consistent predictors of mortality across studies. Smoking had a small mediating effect for neuroticism. Country and baseline age explained variation in effects: studies with older baseline age showed a pattern of protective effects (HR<1.00) for openness, and U.S. studies showed a pattern of protective effects for extraversion. This study demonstrated coordinated analysis as a powerful approach to enhance replicability and reproducibility, especially for aging-related longitudinal research.

Myocardial infarction in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study: the interaction among environmental, health, social, behavioural and genetic factors.

OBJECTIVES: This study examined how environmental, health, social, behavioural and genetic factors interact to contribute to myocardial infarction (MI) risk. DESIGN: Survey data collected by Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), USA, from 1957 to 2011, including 235 environmental, health, social and behavioural factors, and 77 single- nucleotide polymorphisms were analysed for association with MI. To identify associations with MI we utilized recursive partitioning and random forest prior to logistic regression and chi-squared analyses. PARTICIPANTS: 6198 WLS participants (2938 men; 3260 women) who (1) had a MI before 72 years and (2) had a MI between 65 and 72 years. RESULTS: In men, stroke (LR OR: 5.01, 95% CI 3.36 to 7.48), high cholesterol (3.29, 2.59 to 4.18), diabetes (3.24, 2.53 to 4.15) and high blood pressure (2.39, 1.92 to 2.96) were significantly associated with MI up to 72 years of age. For those with high cholesterol, the interaction of smoking and lower alcohol consumption increased prevalence from 23% to 41%, with exposure to dangerous working conditions, a factor not previously linked with MI, further increasing prevalence to 50%. Conversely, MI was reported in <2.5% of men with normal cholesterol and no history of diabetes or depression. Only stroke (4.08, 2.17 to 7.65) and diabetes (2.71, 1.81 to 4.04) by 65 remained significantly associated with MI for men after age 65. For women, diabetes (5.62, 4.08 to 7.75), high blood pressure (3.21, 2.34 to 4.39), high cholesterol (2.03, 1.38 to 3.00) and dissatisfaction with their financial situation (4.00, 1.94 to 8.27) were significantly associated with MI up to 72 years of age. Conversely, often engaging in physical activity alone (0.53, 0.32 to 0.89) or with others (0.34, 0.21 to 0.57) was associated with the largest reduction in odds of MI. Being non-diabetic with normal blood pressure and engaging in physical activity often lowered prevalence of MI to 0.2%. Only diabetes by 65 (4.25, 2.50 to 7.24) and being exposed to dangerous work conditions at 54 (2.24, 1.36 to 3.69) remained significantly associated with MI for women after age 65, while still menstruating at 54 (0.46, 0.23 to 0.91) was associated with reduced odds of MI. CONCLUSIONS: Together these results indicate important differences in factors associated with MI between the sexes, that combinations of factors greatly influence the likelihood of MI, that MI-associated factors change and associations weaken after 65 years of age in both sexes, and that the limited genotypes assessed were secondary to environmental, health, social and behavioral factors.

The Influence of Men's Military Service on Smoking Across the Life Course.

The military is described as a social context that contributes to the (re-)initiation or intensification of cigarette smoking. We draw on data from the 1985-2014 National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to conduct complementary sub-studies of the influence of military service on men's smoking outcomes across the life course. Descriptive findings from an age-period-cohort analysis of NSDUH data document higher probabilities of current smoking and heavy smoking among veteran men across a broad range of cohorts and at all observed ages. Findings from sibling fixed-effects Poisson models estimated on the WLS data document longer durations of smoking among men who served in the military and no evidence that selection explains the observed relationship. Together, these results provide novel and potentially generalizable evidence that participation in the military in early adulthood exerts a causal influence on smoking across the life course.

Income, education, and inflammation: differential associations in a national probability sample (The MIDUS study).

OBJECTIVE: To examine the associations between income and education and three markers of inflammation: interleukin-6 (IL-6), C-reactive protein (CRP), and fibrinogen. Socioeconomic status is inversely linked with health outcomes, but the biological processes by which social position "gets under the skin" to affect health are poorly understood. METHOD: Cross-sectional analyses involved participants (n = 704) from the second wave of the national population-based Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS). Data on pretax household-adjusted income and educational attainment were collected by questionnaire and telephone interview, respectively. Detailed medical history interviews, inventories of medication, and fasting blood samples for assessment of inflammatory proteins were obtained during an overnight clinic stay. RESULTS: All three inflammatory proteins were inversely associated with both income and education in bivariate analyses. However, multivariate regression models, adjusting for potential confounds, showed that only low income predicted higher levels of inflammatory proteins. Moreover, inclusion of IL-6 in the regression models for CRP and fibrinogen eliminated the associations with income. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that income explains the association between education and peripheral inflammation. In short, the reason that higher education is linked to reduced peripheral inflammation is because it reduces the risk for low income status, which is what is directly associated with reduced peripheral inflammation. The findings also suggest that the links between income and both CRP and fibrinogen are mediated by IL-6. These observations help to sharpen our understanding of the relationship between social position and biological markers of illness in the United States.