It is well known that Alzheimer’s disease is able to change behavior, but it is less known that certain personality types itself are a risk vulnerability for Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers from IGF demonstrated that people with a hostile personality type, i.e. an attitude reflecting great mistrust or cynicism towards the motivations of others, named « Cynical Hostility » are at greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Using the Esprit Cohort, Sylvaine Artero and her team followed 1,388 people aged 65 and over from the general population in Montpellier for 8 years, 84 of whom developed dementia. They were able to show that the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease was 2.5 times higher in people with a high level of hostility. By using magnetic resonance imaging in 508 participants, the researchers were able to discover that these hostile older particpants also had cerebral alterations of the white matter (corpus callosum, white matter hypersignals), These lesions are also early markers of Alzheimer’s disease.
How can these data be explained? The increased risk of dementia in people with higher levels of cynical hostility could be induced by lifestyle, wich in turn induced biological changes.
Thus, this study highlighting the impact of a personality type on a neurological disease reinforces the idea of the existence of common mechanisms between neurological and psychiatric pathologies, which now need to be identified. The identification of these mechanisms could be used in the future to develop prevention strategies for Alzheimer’s disease.
Association between the levels of Cynical Hostility and incident Alzheimer’s disease
