Mother’s love is a blessing that may one day save you from dementia

HE was a neat, quietly-spoken, witty, smallish man of Irish extraction who was liked wherever he went, in New York during the Roaring 20s. Not that he went that many places.

He mostly went to the bank — to rob it — and then, when he would get caught, he went to prison, to do his time, having been convicted of the crime.

Willie Sutton never actually gave the response that put him in the quotation books, but in later life admitted it was such a great answer he wished he had said it. The question he supposedly was asked was: “Why do you rob banks?” The answer? “Because that’s where the money is.”

This piece of apocrypha created an unofficial law within medicine, called the Sutton Law, which suggests to medical students that they should look in the obvious places for a diagnosis, rather than getting exotic about their search. If you want to learn about any disease, Sutton’s Law proposes that the place to start is by looking at people suffering from it, or likely to suffer from it. Contrariwise, if you want to learn about normal, healthy people, the sensible place to start is by getting together a cohort of them at an early age and studying them throughout their lives.

Major research studies, however, have tended to look at what’s wrong, rather than at what’s right, and the money — to borrow a more recent phrase — has tended to follow the patient for a few years, rather than following numbers of people of rude health and promise for three quarters of a century.

The exception was and is the Grant Study of Adult Development, funded by the millionaire owner of a chain of American shops which, in the early decades of the 20th century, was a precursor to the Wal-Mart empire. The millionaire was named WT Grant, and in funding the research he hoped to find clues that would help him pick great managers for his stores.

The academic who dreamed up the whole idea, on the other hand, wanted to work out ways to help the US military pick young men with promise as potential officers.

The study, run by Harvard’s Health Services Department, started in 1938. It set out to follow almost 300 graduates of Harvard from three sequential years. That meant the cohort would all be white males (nobody, in the 1930s or for a long time thereafter, was that interested in applying a microscope to the lives of black men, or women of any race). “It seemed sensible at the time to study an elite sample of men,” a current professor of psychiatry at Harvard, George E Vaillant, has pointed out, “and that’s what the Grant Study did”.

They were elite in that they had already won entrance into a prestigious Ivy League university and had higher IQs than most of their age peers.

Students who agreed to be part of the cohort to be studied were initially investigated at length, and in a positive way. The objective in interviewing them about their family background and then interviewing their parents on the same topic was to hear what had been good in those backgrounds, as well as what had been bad. As time went on, they were followed up through questionnaires and visits from study staff, who conducted what might be called semi- structured interviews with them, down through the decades, to establish where they were, in terms of health, earnings, career progress, relationships and self-judgement at different points in their lives.

The study necessarily concentrated, in its early years, on preoccupations of the time, one of which was the physical build of its subjects. It was predicated, if not assumed, that tall men with broad shoulders and slim hips (who might, in another part of the world at that time, have been described as ‘Aryan’), would more naturally move into officer class and be otherwise successful in life than men who were ectomorphs, with skinny bodies, or roundy endomorphs.

As time went on, however, it became clear that build was irrelevant to career progress or life management. Another early preoccupation was with strict as opposed to easygoing toilet training, which, at the time, largely thanks to Freud, was assumed to be vitally important to the developing child and their future as an adult. In fact, as early as 1945, observation of the emerging data proved it to be “entirely without significance for future behavior”.

Although the study failed to confirm contemporary prejudices, it did identify one factor as crucial to success (in work) and happiness. That factor? Having been surrounded by warmth and affection in childhood. It was key even to military life.

When the men studied served their country in the Second World War, whether they came back as a colonel or a private “correlated more highly with a warm childhood than with social class, athleticism, or intelligence”, the study found.

They got promoted, then, because they were charming, easygoing, self-assured?

Not so, according to Vaillant. Nothing so soft and cuddly: “Most independent and most stoical men in the Grant Study were the men who had come from the most loving homes; they had learned that they could put their trust in life, which gave them courage to go out and face it.”

In sharp contrast, young men from a bleak, cold, isolated childhood became sitting ducks for failure, for physical and mental illness, divorce, and earlier death.

THE very length of this study also established that people, no matter how bleak their early years, are nonetheless capable of change and of growth. One such individual, portrayed under a pseudonym in the latest of several books emanating from the study, was a chronic hypochondriac in college and when he served in the army, had what might be charitably described as an undistinguished tour of duty. When he was 35, disaster struck. He was diagnosed as having TB of the lungs. That put him in a veterans’ hospital. He later confessed that he was glad when he got the diagnosis and knew he could go to bed for a year “and get away with it”. The hypochondria fell away, he loved being cared for, and when released from hospital, cared for others as a doctor.

Although a bleak childhood skewed the odds for men in the study, arguably the most frightening finding has emerged only in recent years, as the subjects hit their 90s, when it’s been found that a poor relationship with their mother was “very significantly and very surprisingly, associated with dementia”.

“Of the 115 men without a warm maternal relationship who survived until 80, 39 (33%) were suffering from dementia by age 90. Of the surviving men with a warm maternal relationship, only five (13%) have become demented — a significant difference,” says Prof Vaillant.

Einstein once said something to the effect that a boy who, as a toddler, had the unequivocal adoration of his mother couldn’t be downed by life. This longitudinal study confirms he was correct — right up to that boy’s tenth decade.