The link between life satisfaction and outcome-wide health: evidence from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.

Abstract

A promising avenue for improving physical health and reducing health risks in older adulthood is intervening on transdiagnostic protective factors-those that form the mechanisms of several diseases. A potential candidate for a transdiagnostic protective factor is subjective well-being (SWB). Despite accumulating evidence favoring SWB as a protective factor, individual studies tend to neglect the cumulative effect of publication bias, explicitly specifying a causal model, and the possibility of alternative causal models that guide the selection of confounders. Using 3 waves of longitudinal data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging with a sample of 51 338 older adults, we tested whether the relationships between life satisfaction and 23 health outcomes (e.g., cancer, arthritis, asthma) were robust to alternative causal model specifications. An increase in life satisfaction, according to the preferred causal model, predicted a 3%-31% reduction in the risk of diagnosis for several health outcomes 3 years later-including osteoarthritis, movement disorders, and respiratory tract diseases-and predicted greater self-rated general health. Importantly, these effects persisted under different causal model specifications. These results suggest that life satisfaction is prospectively linked to multiple positive health outcomes and demonstrate the value of an analytical framework that acknowledges the uncertainty inherent in confounder selection.