Having a high IQ score no longer means just intelligence. It also signifies that the individual is healthy, according to researchers in Scotland, who report in BMJ Online First. The report also says that low IQ scores partly explain the gap in health in the rich and the poor.
Around 1,300 participants took part in this study in Western Scotland. All of them, aged 56 years took an IQ test in 1987. These subjects were then monitored for the next 16 years by researchers led by G. David Batty, PhD of the University of Glasgow. The IQ scores were calibrated by means of a written test, while the socioeconomic status was measured by an interview with the participant.
But since written IQ tests are not without biases, the researchers also tested the computer reaction times of the participants. It was found that the poorest of the participants were the most likely to experience health problems like heart disease or even succumb to long illness. But when the IQ sores were also taken into account illness and mortality was found to be significantly less.
”Our findings indicate that measured IQ does not completely account for observed socioeconomic inequalities in health but, probably through a variety of processes, may contribute to them,” the authors write in their paper. “The currently scant information about IQ and health needs to be enhanced, with empirical investigation of why IQ might predict health and how the links between low socioeconomic status, low IQ, and poor health might be broken."
