According to a recent study published in The Journal of Psychiatry Research (2014) , the type of complaint that we express in relation to our mental functioning is decisive in the risk of mortality . That is, depending on what ails us subjectively (many times it does not correspond to real cognitive performance) we will face a greater or lesser life expectancy.
A total of 15,510 middle-aged people participated in the research (mean age was 57.9 years) . They were asked questions about how they perceived their functioning, for example in memory, the ability to retain information, their ability to calculate mentally, language or orientation , and also about whether they had sought medical advice in relation to these cognitive complaints of subjective type. The results showed that 56.3% of the participants complained of memory problems, 62.6% of them had complaints about their functioning in other areas, and 651 people died after the initial study.
In general, cognitive complaints were associated with depression, and depression with a greater tendency to mortality. But what was most significant about the study was that, even controlling for factors such as age, educational level, marital status, and degree of depression, cognitive complaints about mental computational ability were associated with higher mortality . The same did not happen with memory complaints. Without being alarmist, you already know the saying: “better safe than sorry”. So, if you think that your abilities to calculate, concentrate or remember are no longer what they were, you better train and strengthen them.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
