Book-readers live nearly two years longer

Bookworms everywhere can attest how a good read can improve quality of life. But according to a new study published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, reading books could also help improve the length of a person’s life by up to two years, especially in elderly people.

The study authors noted that book-reading’s positive health benefits held, even when considering that it is often a sedentary activity, which can in itself be a predictor for mortality. But the activity’s cognitive benefits appear to be beneficial enough to outweigh its possible negative effects.

The biggest cognitive and mortality gains were seen by people who read books and not just newspapers or magazines.

That difference (and the overall protective benefits of reading anything) might be because of the cognitive connections reading requires brains to make.

As the authors explained, “First, it promotes 'deep reading,' which is a slow, immersive process; this cognitive engagement occurs as the reader draws connections to other parts of the material, finds applications to the outside world, and asks questions about the content presented. Cognitive engagement may explain why vocabulary, reasoning, concentration, and critical thinking skills are improved by exposure to books. Second, books can promote empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence, which are cognitive processes that can lead to greater survival Better health behaviors and reduced stress may explain this process.”

The 3,635 study participants were older than 50 and part of the Health and Retirement Study at the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Aging, followed between 2001 and 2012. They completed telephone questionnaires about their demographic info and lifestyles, including about their reading habits. The survey also tested for certain cognitive abilities, which allowed the researchers to look for any correlations between reading and cognitive ability.

The researchers found that people who read even for a few hours a week had higher survival rates than those who didn’t. Throughout their monitoring, about 33 percent of non-book readers died, while only about 27 percent of book readers did.

When looking at the people who did die during the study, those who read books lived an average of nearly two years longer than the people who did not read.

The analyses of these benefits held up even when controlling for other potential mortality influencers such as wealth/income, other health conditions, gender, baseline cognition and education.

And while book-reading was definitely most positively associated with these cognitive and life-span benefits, spending seven or more hours a week reading periodicals did bestow some protective anti-mortality effect.

The study’s authors called for more research in the area, including into whether or not book reading had an influence on other measures of health, and whether or not there was a difference in protective benefits between fiction readers and non-fiction readers.

Plus, it could be useful to uncover the mechanisms by which reading reduces mortality: stress reduction, lower blood pressure, dementia prevention, etc.