Lifestyle

New research shows that every $50,000 of income lowers a person’s risk of death by five percent. Money may not buy happiness, but it could buy you a longer life. New research concludes that being wealthy can add years to your lifespan. Study Finds reports:

Researchers at Northwestern University say that every time another $50,000 accumulated by middle age, an individual’s risk of death drops. And for those who had stashed $139,000 more than a sibling, their chances of outliving them increased.

The study is based on 5,400 Americans tracked for almost a quarter of a century.

“One of the keys to a long life may lie in your net worth,” says corresponding author Dr. Eric Finegood, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern. in a statement.

Unsurprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic widened the wealth gap. Amid the misery, the number of millionaires in the U.S. rose last year by 5.2 million – to over 56 million. Mortality rates fell five percent for every additional $50,000 of net worth accumulated by middle age.

Moreover, the same phenomenon was identified among the 2,490 who were twins or siblings. Big earners were more likely to outlive brothers and sisters on smaller salaries. “A difference of $139,000 was associated with a 13 percent relative decrease in the probability of death nearly 24 years later, favoring the family member with a higher net worth,” says Dr. Finegood.

It suggests affluence leads to good health, rather than being a reflection of heritable traits or early experiences that cluster in families.

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent stay-at-home and social distancing directives might have played a major role in romance scams losses reaching record levels in 2020, the US Federal Trade Commission said in a report last week. ZDNet reports:

The old saying goes “money can’t buy happiness,” but a new study finds that’s not exactly true. Although previous studies find there’s a limit to how much a person’s income impacts their happiness, a researcher from the University of Pennsylvania says the sky’s the limit when it comes to money’s influence over well-being. Study Finds reports:

Killingsworth’s study examined nearly two million data points from over 33,000 people; each providing a moment-to-moment snapshot of their daily lives. Other studies on income and happiness concluded that money stops mattering at around $75,000. The results of the new study, however, reveal that rising income continues to affect the earner’s well-being even into the hundreds of thousands of dollars…

After calculating the well-being of each person in the study, Killingsworth compared the results to each participant’s income. According to a 2010 paper, experienced well-being plateaus when someone hits $75,000 in annual salary. The new results find that number may have to change.

“It’s a compelling possibility, the idea that money stops mattering above that point, at least for how people actually feel moment to moment,” the researcher says. “But when I looked across a wide range of income levels, I found that all forms of well-being continued to rise with income. I don’t see any sort of kink in the curve, an inflection point where money stops mattering. Instead, it keeps increasing.”

The Food and Drug Administration authorized BioNTech and Pfizer Inc.’s COVID-19 vaccine Friday evening, which will make it the first vaccine to reach Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. MarketWatch reports:

“The FDA’s authorization for emergency use of the first COVID-19 vaccine is a significant milestone in battling this devastating pandemic that has affected so many families in the United States and around the world,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn said in a statement. “Today’s action follows an open and transparent review process that included input from independent scientific and public health experts and a thorough evaluation by the agency’s career scientists to ensure this vaccine met FDA’s rigorous, scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality needd to support emergency use authorization.”  

The vaccine — which was developed by Germany’s BioNTech, and is being commercialized by American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer — is the first COVID-19 vaccine to receive emergency use authorization in the U.S. and the first mRNA product to ever receive any type of regulatory approval. 

Since the first efficacy data was shared publicly, anticipation for the highly efficacious vaccine has largely sent up markets, which view vaccination as the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 crisis. Federal health officials have said the administration of the vaccine could begin within days of authorization.

Patterns of missing credit card and loan payments could be an early indicator of dementia years before diagnosis, a new study says. CNN Health reports:

The study, published Monday in the medical journal JAMA, looked at Medicare patients living alone across the United States and analyzed their credit data and payments over time.

Researchers found that patients with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia were more likely to miss payments up to six years before getting diagnosed, the study said. And, those poor financial actions led them to subprime credit scores two and a half years before diagnosis, as opposed to the patients without dementia.

“I think we were a little surprised that it was so common that we could really see it in the data,” lead author Lauren Hersch Nicholas told CNN. “Doctors colloquially say that you should look for dementia in the checkbook, but I don’t think we had any sense of for how many years in advance these effects could be happening.”

Nicholas is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. Researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors led the study.

Alzheimer’s dementia affects about 5.8 million Americans who are 65 and older, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. The number of Americans with the disease is projected to hit 13.8 million by 2050, the non-profit said.

As society gets richer, people chase the wrong things. One of the greatest paradoxes in American life is that while, on average, existence has gotten more comfortable over time, happiness has fallen. The Atlantic reports: