Saturday, July 18, 2009

IQ & heart disease   posted by Razib @ 7/18/2009 10:21:00 PM
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IQ Explains Some Of The Difference In Heart Disease Between People Of High And Low Socio-economic Status:
Authors of the study published in the European Heart Journal on 15 July...analysed data from a group of 4,289 former soldiers in the USA. They found that IQ explained more than 20% of the difference in mortality between people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds compared to those from more advantaged backgrounds. Importantly, this was in addition to the classical, known risk factors for heart disease, such as smoking and obesity.
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"The difference between the second and third analyses showed that IQ alone explained a further 23% of the differences in mortality between the higher and lower ends of the socio-economic spectrum, in addition to the other, known risk factors," said Dr Batty. “IQ wasn’t a magic bullet in this study, but this psychological variable had additional explanatory power on top of the classic variables such as smoking, high blood pressure, high blood glucose and obesity. It has partially explained the differences in death from heart disease and all causes."
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...there could be three possible explanations for Dr Batty's findings: "(i) intelligence might lead to greater knowledge about how to pursue healthy behaviours; (ii) intelligence may "cause" socioeconomic position, i.e. more intelligence leads to more education, income, occupational prestige . . .; and (iii) intelligence may be a marker for something else, and it is that something else, early life exposures, for example, that leads to mortality."....



When correlations between socioeconomic status and health outcomes emerge, generally there is an assumption that the differences are due to disparate access to health care, or, more vaguely to the mysterious effect of low social status on someone's health. Matt Ridley actually posited the second explanation in Genome. As noted above intelligence does not explain everything, but its role is unfortunately not considered all too often. If, for example, intelligence has some correlation with time preference, and time preference modulates one's risk calculus, the causal chain which might result in disparate health outcomes is obvious. In The Myth of the Rational Voter Bryan Caplan has a reasonable number of references to the literature which show that the more intelligent may not be particularly rational in any absolute sense, but they are far more rational than the conventionally dull in a relative sense.

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