Abstract
Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) shortens with age, and is a prospective marker of mortality related to cardiovascular disease. Many health behaviors and social environmental factors have been found to be associated with LTL. Several of these are also associated with conscientiousness, a dispositional personality trait. Conscientiousness is a propensity to be planful, adhere to social norms, and inhibit pre-potent responses. Like LTL, conscientiousness is prospectively related to mortality, possibly through cumulative effects on health over the life course via multiple pathways. As a result, we hypothesized that childhood levels of conscientiousness would predict LTL prospectively in adulthood. We selected a sample of 60 women in the Hawaii Personality and Health Cohort; 30 described by their teachers as high on conscientiousness in childhood and 30 described as low on the trait. Dried blood spot samples collected in adulthood 40 years later were used as sources of DNA for the LTL assay. Conscientiousness was associated with longer LTL (p = .02). Controlling for age did not account for this association. Controlling for education and physiological dysregulation partially attenuated the association, and the effect remained significant when accounting for differences in LTL across cultural groups. These results represent the first evidence that childhood personality prospectively predicts LTL 40 years later in adulthood. Our findings would be consistent with a mediation hypothesis whereby conscientiousness predicts life paths and trajectories of health that are reflected in rates of LTL erosion across the lifespan.
Highlights
A considerable amount of evidence has accumulated demonstrating that personality traits show important associations with health and longevity [1]
Consistent with our previous work with the Hawaii cohort, higher childhood conscientiousness was associated with higher educational attainment [5], lower body mass index (BMI), and healthier levels of overall physiological dysregulation [26]
Our findings suggest that childhood conscientiousness assessed by teachers predicts Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) 40 years later in adulthood
Summary
A considerable amount of evidence has accumulated demonstrating that personality traits show important associations with health and longevity [1]. Many of the same mechanisms linking conscientiousness to health and mortality, including physical activity, smoking, and educational attainment, have been found to predict leukocyte telomere length (LTL) [9,10,11,12]. Because LTL is a cumulative outcome resulting from biological insults and stresses across many years, dispositional traits, which may exert persistent effects on factors related to health, are expected to be associated with LTL [21]. While this view is generally accepted, most of the work to date focusing on dispositional characteristics and variation in LTL has focused on health damaging effects associated with depression [22], anxiety [23], and neuroticism [21] in the context of stressful and traumatic life events [24]. Because LTL has been demonstrated to vary across cultural and ethnic groups [27, 28], we report on differences in LTL across ethnic and cultural groups and include this important variable in our analyses
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