Are You Goal Oriented? It May Help Your Brain.

Fans of "Getting Things Done" and other time management systems may find that their obsession has another benefit beyond the joy of checking things off the to-do list. Self-disciplined people are less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease as they age, according to new research.

A team led by Robert Wilson of Chicago's Rush University Medical Center collected information from nearly 1,000 older Catholic priests, nuns, and brothers in 1994, and followed up recently. They found that people who scored highest in a measure of conscientiousness at the start of the study had a 90% lower risk of developing Alzheimer's than those who scored poorest on the same measure.

For the purposes of the study, conscientiousness is synonymous with self-discipline, goal-directed, scrupulous, purposeful, and dependability.

Wilson's team can only hypothesize about the linkage between conscientiousness and Alzheimer's. It may be that conscientiousness is linked to educational and / or career success, which has also been linked to lower Alzheimer's risk (possibly because "better" jobs are more challenging and keep the brain running at full speed). Another possibility is that conscientiousness is tied to resilience and the ability to cope with problems; these abilities, they write, "might lessen the adverse consequences of negative life events and chronic psychological distress, which have been associated with risk of dementia in old age."

The research appears in the October, 2007 issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. An abstract is here and a press release summarizing the study is here.