Book Readers Live Longer Lives, According to New Study from Yale University

Good to know! The more I read the time I will have to read. Very good news!
Thank you.

V. Fleis­ch­er

Although I like the result of this study a lot, and I intu­itive­ly strong­ly believe in their con­clu­sion, from a method­olog­i­cal point of view it suf­fers from the same short­com­mings as many oth­er ret­ro­spec­tive social stud­ies. The stud­ies usu­al­ly analyse ques­tion­aires they receive from ran­dom­ly picked indi­vid­u­als. No doubt, analysing 3, 635 peo­ples health sta­tus and their read­ing behav­iour is a vast amount of work and an asso­ci­a­tion found between the read­ing habits and health sta­tus will be sig­nif­i­cant­ly and repro­ducible.

But what remains to be shown is the causal­i­ty. I.e. can I increase my life expectan­cy (or this of my chil­dren) if I or if we force our­self to read more books ? And this is not clear, and the Yale study also has no answer to this. In epi­demi­ol­o­gy there is this well-known phe­nom­e­non of “reverse cau­sa­tion”, which in the cur­rent stud­ies could also under­ly the report­ed asso­ci­a­tion. If one assume that any genet­ic or epi­ge­net­ic fac­tor (or a com­bi­na­tion of those) improves a per­sons health sta­tus in gen­er­al (includ­ing men­tal health, but also neu­ro-sen­so­ry fit­ness such as eye vision), this will inde­pen­dent­ly lead to an incraesed longevi­ty but at the same time also to a high­er prefen­rence to enrich ones life by read­ing good books. So these two out­comes of a ques­tion­aire, health status/life expectan­cy and fre­quen­cy of read­ing books will auto­mat­icly be linked, cause they are influ­enced strong­ly by the same under­ly­ing inher­ent fac­tors (genet­ic com­po­si­tion and epi­ge­net­ic prae­gung). So they are clear­ly linked to each oth­er, but not caus­ing each oth­er.

The only sol­id prove of a cau­sa­tion of book read­ing and longevi­ty would be a so-called ran­dom­ized study (as they are state-of-the-art in clin­i­cal tri­als to test the ther­a­peu­tic effect of new drug or method). Here, a large num­ber of vol­un­teers have to be recruit­ed, and they assigned to a con­trol and a test group ran­dom­ly. And these two groups have to fol­low a defined pro­to­col, whether they liek it or not. The con­trol group should not read books (even if some group mem­bers are real book freaks), where­as the mem­bers of the test group all should read a defined min­i­mal num­bers of books (per month) whether they like books or not. And this study has to be fol­lowed over years or decades, of course. One could then do a sim­ple non-para­met­ric test (like Man-Whit­ney or Wilcox­on) for the attained age at death and could eas­i­ly found if an inten­tion­al increase in book read­ing helps to extend life span.

Michael (https://brokenradius.com/2016/08/17/read-more-books-live-a-longer-life/)