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Climbing the social ladder may lower your risk of dementia 40%, study finds
Being a social climber doesn't just get people invites to the best parties - it also does wonders for their health.
Researchers in Japan found people who climbed the social ladder were less likely to get dementia by up to 40 percent.
People born into a low income home with little social support who gained more wealth and social standing over their life saw the biggest protective effect.
Conversely, people who were stuck on a low rung in the socioeconomic ladder, those that moved from higher to lower standing and those who hung somewhere in the middle were all more likely to develop dementia than the climbers.
About 55 million people are currently living with dementia. Scientists think a combination of genetic and lifestyle factors probably contribute to your likelihood for developing the disease.
Social support decreases your risk for developing dementia. This study was one of the first to show if changing your social standing can affect your dementia risk.
'This report marks the first documentation, to our knowledge, of the benefits of upward SES patterns during the life course for dementia prevention,' the study authors wrote in the paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open.
The researchers suggest that social climbing could make the brain more resistant to stress, which is thought to be a big risk factor for dementia.
The authors point to research from Rutgers University which found that people who stick through stressful life experiences have better memory's.
This could be because the stressful situation requires a person to learn more, which exercises their brain, making it stronger and more able to withstand the changes that occur as we age.
Lead author Hiroyasu Iso, an epidemiologist and director of the Institute for Global Health Policy Research (iGHP), said scientists have known for a long time that the more social support someone has, the less likely they are to develop dementia.
One French study, for example, showed that people who were lonely in old age were 30 percent more likely to develop dementia than those with a rich social life.
But very few studies have investigated if changing your social status can protect you from those risks, Dr Iso wrote.
Dr Iso's study used data from the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study (JAGES), which tracked the living conditions of approximately 200,000 people 65 years or older in Japan from 2010-2016 in order to determine what factors helped them live healthier, longer.
They divided people into different categories based on their average income, education level and self-reported social life.
The lowest income earned on average $7217 per year or less, the highest earned $38,690.
The lower positions on the ladder were often underweight, more likely to live alone, more likely to suffer from a mental illness and were less likely to earn an advanced degree.
The researcher's lowest tier also reported feeling like they had less social support at home, less friends nearby and were more likely to live in a rural area.
The highest socioeconomic groups had people that were more educated, more likely to exercise, more likely to socialize and lived in more urban areas. Also, they reported feeling like they had social support at home, and close friends nearby.
Social climbers, therefore, were those who were born into a low income environment and received little early education, but built themselves up into a wealthier household.
Roughly 5.8 million people in the US and 944,000 people in the UK have dementia, according to the CDC and NHS.
The degenerative condition will affect someone in most everyone's life, yet we actually understand very little about what causes the debilitating disease.
Lifestyle factors - like whether you grew up rich or poor - seem to play a factor.
The new findings build on a study published by University of College London researchers earlier this year.
The UCL researchers discovered that people who moved up the social ladder were 50 percent less likely to develop dementia than someone who moved down it.
However, scientists haven't always drawn a similar conclusion, corresponding author, epidemiologist and the Director of the iGHP, Hiroyasu Iso, wrote.
For example, a 12 year study in Sacramento of 1789 older US participants from Mexico found that people who had started from an advantageous social position but changed over time were no more at risk for dementia than any other group.