IQ among strongest predictors of cardiovascular disease -- second only to cigarette smoking
Wednesday, February 10, 2010 - 06:21
in Health & Medicine
as reflected by low results on written or oral tests of IQ - have been associated with a raised risk of cardiovascular disease, no study has so far compared the relative strength of this association with other established risk factors such as obesity, smoking and high blood pressure. Now, a large study funded by Britain's Medical Research Council, which set out to gauge the relative importance of IQ alongside other risk factors, has found that lower intelligence scores were associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease and total mortality at a greater level of magnitude than found with any other risk factor except smoking.