What is the association between your personality and a risk of development of Alzheimer’s Disease. 

Do you share the same greatest fear with Bill Gates? And how to make changes to bullet proof your future. 

Bill Gates’ greatest fear is that one day his brain will stop working. (“Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates”). I think this is easy to relate to it, losing your ability to access a memory, to express yourself or to communicate with your loved ones is a terrifying prospect for many who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. 

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, it is an irreversible, progressive brain disorder.  Some of the initial symptoms include forgetfulness, difficulties with memory, memory loss and decreased independence. Researchers have mentioned that accumulation of beta amyloid protein happens or progresses decades before initial symptoms. The researchers wanted to find out if there are any links between a person’s personality traits and accumulation of beta amyloid. A study published in 2020 in Psychology and Ageing has decided to investigate a potential link between personality traits and the development of Alzheimer’s Disease. 

Can you really predict someone’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by knowing their personality? 

Let’s take a look for a moment at our personality traits. 

We are all different and our differences are often referred to as personality traits. Our personality traits are mainly consistent across situations, they are stable, people are different from one another on behaviours related to our traits. You may have heard about “The Big Five Approach” or “Five Factor Model” – they are considered to be 5 major personality traits. An easy acronym to remember these traits is OCEAN: O is for Openness, C for Conscientiousness, E- Extraversion, A for Agreeableness and N for Neuroticism). Remember that we don’t use the traits as categorical measures but rather we use them as a spectrum. For example you might be an extreme rule follower, you will never cross the road unless there is a safe and legal way to do so, or you might run across occasionally depending on the emergency of the situation or you might be someone who check the road briefly and if there are no cars they cross the road even though it is not at a designated area for crossing. Thus, you can display a high, medium or low level of conscientiousness. 

  • Do you challenge yourself with new ideas? Do you enjoy new experiences? Openness refers to our tendency to appreciate new art, ideas, values, feelings and behaviours. 
  • Are you orderly, self-disciplined, dutiful? Conscientiousness refers to our ability to be careful, on-time for appointments, to follow rules, and to be hard-working.
  • Are you active, social, excitement seeking? Extraversion refers to our tendency to be talkative, sociable and to enjoy others the tendency to have a dominant style.  
  • Do you tend to be compliant, trusting, altruistic? Agreeableness refers to our tendency to agree and to go along with others rather than to assert one’s own opinion and choices.  
  • Are you frequently anxious, angry, feeling depressed? Do you make impulsive decisions and struggle with self-control? Neuroticism refers to our tendency to frequently experience negative emotions such as anger worry, and sadness as well as being interpersonally sensitive.  

As written in the study investigating personality traits and risk for development of Alzheimer’s disease, Chapmen and his colleagues in the year 2000 have already suggested that your personality trait that is identified in your adolescent might be a true and independent risk factor for dementia by the age of 70. Yoon and his colleagues highlighted previous examples of other researchers who have investigated personality traits and have suggested that people who score low on conscientiousness and high on neuroticism might be more at risk of development of this degenerative disorder. How can our personality trait be associated with our risk for the development of this degenerative condition – one of the possible explanations could be our development of coping strategies and lifestyle choices. High conscientiousness has been associated with more time spent undertaking physical activity and low levels of physical activity were associated in turn with lower conscientiousness and higher neuroticism. One of the hypotheses that was posed by the researches considered if exercise and physical activity were associated with lower levels of amyloid protein and that it modulates amyloid production and clearance through direct and indirect pathways.  

More broadly unhealthy behaviours were positively correlated with neuroticism. It might be due to lower impulse control and therefore development of unhelpful or unhealthy habits. Perhaps as a stress reduction activity a person who scores high in neuroticism might chose to have a glass of wine rather than to go for a run. In turn, conscientiousness has been associated with a higher fruit and vegetable intake, lower smoking and alcohol consumption, and lower risk of obesity. 

Take a look at our Stop Binge Drinking course and Binge Eating course if obesity or binge drinking is impacting your life. 

Yoon and his colleagues were not the only researchers who showed that a trait of conscientiousness might be linked to a healthier cognitive ageing. Another recent study “Personality and dementia risk in England and Australia” found similar results. While, the results were mixed for conscientiousness, the researchers found that lower extraversion was associated with increased dementia risk in the English sample, while lower agreeableness was related to increased dementia risk in the Australian sample. However, neuroticism was associated with increased risk of incident dementia in both samples. 

Of course, further research is needed to help us to understand the risk and protective factors when discussing development of Alzheimer’s disease. 

Of course, you are not able to change your personality, but knowing how some of your lifestyle choices place you at risk of development Alzheimer’s might be a wakeup call to help you to make some lifestyle choices today. And of course, I know that if you are struggling with your impulsiveness and score high in neuroticism, even knowing that you are placing yourself at risk might not be enough. 

In my experience, if you score high on neuroticism and struggle with your impulse control, have developed a number of unhealthy behaviours and habits, including binge drinking, impulsive and mindless overeating, damaging anger expression, there is no magic solution to stop these behaviours and start doing something else. I understand that there is a reason why you might have started drinking as a way of coping with stress, anxiety or try to mend your broken heart, however you continue these behaviour because unhelpful habits have been established and it is hard for you to stop because it is hard to resist temptation and to tolerate urges. 

I know it is hard, but it’s worth it to change, to give yourself a chance to live longer, to prevent development of a chronic health condition, to feel healthy and happy. We can help you with our programs, which were developed to address the issues of impulsivity and impulse control. Check out our programs here …

We can help you to overcome these unhelpful habits and free yourself of this long-term struggle. 

Here are a few tips on how to prepare yourself for change. 

  1. Everyday remind yourself of the consequences of your choices. 
  2. Write down why do you want to change
  3. Write down why is it necessary for you to change
  4. Write down how it is possible for you to change
  5. Write down why is it worth it for you to change
  6. Spend a few minutes each day imagining how life is better and different as a result of it
  7. Prepare a plan for change (including how will you start, who will support you, how will you deal with lapses) 

Give it a go, and after a week or so of consistently doing it these 7 steps sign up to our program to help you to improve yourself control and change your life for good. 

Sources:

Yoon, B., Baker, S. L., Korman, D., Tennant, V. R., Harrison, T. M., Landau, S., & Jagust, W. J. (2020). Conscientiousness is associated with less amyloid deposition in cognitively normal aging. Psychology and Aging, 35(7), 993.
Aschwanden, D., Sutin, A. R., Luchetti, M., Stephan, Y., & Terracciano, A. (2020). Personality and dementia risk in England and Australia. GeroPsych: The Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychiatry.