healthier people tend to be more optimistic

3.24: news.health/healthier people tend to be more optimistic:
. the more optimistic people tend to also be healthier;
so, it is conjectured that being optimistic
can be learned and can enhance health.
. it could be that optimism creates less stress,
and stress can be a source of disease?
. there are studies of visualization
showing that you can get better sports performance
by visualizing what it is you want to do;
so, perhaps learned optimism could involve
visualization of better health?
. optimism might be the opposite of depression;
and depression is an inflammatory disease,
that seems to coexist with many other
inflammation-related diseases
(cancer, heart disease, stroke, etc).
. ways of learning optimism might involve
learning to mentally control inflammation.

Am J Epidemiol (2017)
. used prospective data from the
Nurses’ Health Study (n = 70,021).
Dispositional optimism was measured in 2004;
. all-cause and cause-specific mortality rates
were assessed from 2006 to 2012.
. a higher degree of optimism
was associated with a lower mortality risk.
After adjustment for sociodemographic confounders,
compared with women in the lowest quartile of optimism,
women in the highest quartile had a hazard ratio of
0.71 (95% confidence interval: 0.66, 0.76)
for all-cause mortality.
Adding health behaviors, health conditions, and depression
attenuated but did not eliminate the associations
(hazard ratio = 0.91, 95% confidence interval: 0.85, 0.97).
Associations were maintained for various causes of death,
including cancer, heart disease, stroke,
respiratory disease, and infection.