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Your heart is only as old as you feel
May/June 2009
by Emily Anthes '05
Young
people who think of the elderly as feeble, helpless, or otherwise impaired may
be engaging in self-fulfilling prophecy. Becca Levy, an epidemiologist and
psychologist at the School of Public Health, and her colleagues have shown that
young adults with ageist attitudes can put their own future health at risk.
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Young adults with ageist attitudes can put their own future health at risk.
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Levy
and her team analyzed data originally collected for the Baltimore Longitudinal
Study of Aging, a study of more than 400 18- to 49-year-olds. The subjects took
a survey in the 1960s about their attitudes toward older people, and they were
medically monitored for decades.
Levy
found that young adults with negative views of older adults were more likely to
have cardiovascular problems in later life. "The negative stereotypes were
associated with higher risk," Levy says, even after she and her team adjusted
for gender, body mass index, family history, and other factors. When they
looked at just the younger subjects—those who had been 39 or under at the time
of the initial survey—the effect was even stronger; participants with negative
stereotypes were twice as likely to suffer from strokes, heart attacks, and
other problems after their 60th birthdays than those with more positive views.
(The study was published in the March issue of Psychological Science.)
The
findings suggest that people internalize their attitudes toward the elderly at
an early age, though the specific mechanism behind the effect on heart health
remains unclear. "We're really interested in finding out the specifics of how
these effects occur," says Levy. "I'm also interested in thinking about how to
overcome some of these negative stereotypes." So far, studies reveal that most
people’s attitudes toward the elderly are remarkably consistent across their
life spans, but it’s possible that changing the attitudes of the young, Levy
says, could pay dividends for their health later in life. 
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