Left-handed people live less than right-handed people: truth or myth? Answered by a neurologist

neurologist, neurophysiologist, scientific director of the Clinic of Restorative Neurology

There are many studies that answer the question: why some people write with their left hand and others with their right. In the course of studying the peculiarities of our brain, there is a statistic that left-handed people live less than right-handed people. Is this true?

Each of us can be divided into right-handed and left-handed, and some of us can even write with two hands. For society, for a long time, “left-handed” people were considered abnormal. Even children who wrote with their left hand were retrained.

This was motivated by the fact that right-handed people were the standard, and all objects were made for their convenience. Left-handed people would simply find it inconvenient to use many things. In the USSR, however, it was believed that a person should not stand out from the general mass and everyone should be the same. In the modern world, there are no such stereotypes anymore.

The origin of myths

There have been studies according to which left-handed people had a shorter life expectancy than right-handed people.

In an issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers Dr. Diane F. Halpern of UCLA and Dr. Stanley Koren of the University of British Columbia, who studied the deaths of 1,000 Southern California residents, reported that right-handed people on average live to be 75 years old.

Left-handed people typically die at age 66. The trend was observed in both men and women. It turned out that the former were more than five times (7.9% vs. 1.5%) more likely to die in accidents, often while driving. The authors of the paper suggested that one reason is that left-handed people live in a world designed for right-handed people.

The world is tailored for right-handed people

In 1989, Dr. W. P. London stated that there is nothing surprising about the shorter life expectancy of left-handed people, as they have higher rates of alcoholism, smoking, some neurological and immune disorders.

However, in the same year, Dr. Max Anderson made the opposite statement that right-handed people have a longer life expectancy than left-handed people. Back in 1992, Dr. Charles Graham and his colleagues at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock concluded that the latter actually live shorter lives.

The scientists attributed this to the fact that left-handed people have more accidents in a world adapted for right-handed people. Equipment and medical devices are not adapted for 11% of left-handed people, which often has disastrous consequences.

There is no need to bend to a changing world

From a scientific point of view, both left-handed and right-handed people are normal people, the only difference is the activity of the hemisphere, and which hemisphere will be dominant is determined in the womb. Therefore, left-handedness as a cause of early death should not be taken seriously.

The studies that have been done cannot be considered objective. They only took into account the number of left-handed and right-handed people in old age, but did not take into account the fact that in childhood most left-handed people were retrained to be right-handed.