It may seem like a subjective question. But your answer to, "How in general would you rate your health?" may offer surprising insights into your chances of being alive 30 years from now. And thinking of yourself as excellent or lousy can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Scientists have known since the 1980s that how people describe their own health is predictive of their chances of survival over the next five or 10 years, which is why doctors so often ask such a seemingly strange and irrelevant question. Isn’t it their job, after all, to determine how good or bad your health is?
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But with such short follow-up times, previous research left open the possibility that patients who rated their health as poor were sensing symptoms that their doctors had not yet detected.
For the new study, researchers from the University of Zurich's Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine took a longer view. First, they collected data from more than 8,000 people who had participated in a health study in the late 1970s. Then, they checked to see how those people fared through the year 2000.
In addition to being checked for all sorts of demographic information and health measures, participants rated their own health status on a scale from “excellent” to “very poor.”
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The worse people described their health, the less likely they were to be alive 30 years after the study began, the researchers reported in the journal PLoS ONE.
Men who said their health was "very poor" were more than three times as likely to die over the long-term, compared with men the same age who said their health was "excellent."
For women who ranked their health very low, the risk of dying was double that of women who thought themselves much healthier. With each notch lower on the scale, rates of death gradually grew.
These trends held even when the team took into account a long list of relevant medical risk factors, including disease diagnoses, use of medications, smoking history and blood pressure.
That, combined with long-term results, suggests that people who take an optimistic view of health aren’t just tuned in to medically induced premonitions. They may also have personality attributes that boost their resilience and literally enhance their well-being.
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"Persons rating their health as 'excellent' may have an advantage over others, not primarily because of absence of disease but because of a high satisfaction with their life," the researchers wrote in the paper.
"Our findings should encourage clinicians to not only look for the presence or absence of disease or impairment but also support their patients in managing and generating health resources and thus provide an environment that promotes a healthy life."
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