The Forgotten Habit That Lowers Dementia, Depression & Aging | Daisy Fancourt

1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

   Why is it that you think the arts and our engagement with the arts should be considered the fifth pillar of health?

2. DFDaisy Fancourt0:10

   Over the last few decades, we've had this absolute explosion of scientific studies looking at how the arts influence our mind, brain, body, and behavior. And now we're seeing from that research that arts can have really tangible, meaningful effects on us, often with similar effect sizes that we see from other behaviors like physical activity or sleep. So I think it's really important that we're actually acknowledging that and talking about it because it's another thing that we can all be doing in our lives that could be having real impact.

3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:37

   Yeah, it's interesting. When I was reading your book, The Art Cure, the amount of studies in there for different diseases, different aspects of our health, our wellbeing, our psychology, it is absolutely incredible how much research there actually is that I would argue most people simply don't know about.

4. DFDaisy Fancourt0:58

   It's been this bizarrely well-kept secret, and I think part of it is that, you know, it's a natural process that you have to get evidence that builds up gradually over time that then gradually starts to reach public awareness. A lot of it gets published in quite obscure medical journals initially. But I also think that there is a sort of challenge in the way that we view arts in society. We often think of them as this sort of fluffy luxury thing that shouldn't really be a priority. It's the nice to have rather than the essential, and I think that has obscured some of our thinking actually about how we engage in the arts.

5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:27

   There are so many studies I could choose to, to jump off onto. One that comes to mind is towards the end of the book in the chapter on longevity, you talk about hypertension-

6. DFDaisy Fancourt1:40

   Mm-hmm

7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:40

   ... high blood pressure, and in that chapter you talk about research where listening to music-

8. DFDaisy Fancourt1:47

   Yeah

9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:47

   ... can lower our blood pressure to an amount comparable or even superior to certain drugs that we have. That's incredible, right?

10. DFDaisy Fancourt1:57

    It is. It's really exciting. There have now been direct trials that have said, what if we tell people the advice we normally tell them, so lifestyle changes and medication, or what if we do that and we tell them to listen to music every day? And actually we find that the music group have improvements above and beyond the other group. In other words, adding music into our lifestyle or our medication for hypertension leads to extra reductions of about 9 to 10 kind of points in systolic blood pressure, which is an amazing change. And partly this is really down to the relaxing effects that music has on us. It's such a potent way of calming ourselves down, and that's something that is so important in hypertension.

11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:32

    Have any studies looked at music in isolation, so without the lifestyle advice, without the pharmaceutical intervention? If you have high blood pressure, what does listening to music alone do? Have we seen any evidence about that?

12. DFDaisy Fancourt2:47

    Yes, we have d- done that, and actually, when we look at the general population, people who are more regularly engaged in the arts have lower levels of blood pressure. They have lower heart rates. They also have better cholesterol, lower glucose levels, and this is even when we've taken account of things like whether they're doing exercise or what their diet is alongside this. This is what we're seeing a- additively from them being involved in the arts, too.

13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:08

    Yeah. If I think about high blood pressure, and I think about how I was taught about it, one of the things I don't feel was emphasized enough to me as a medical student was the idea that high blood pressure is a natural consequence of chronic stress.

14. DFDaisy Fancourt3:25

    Mm-hmm.

15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:25

    So it's part of the stress response.

16. DFDaisy Fancourt3:27

    Mm-hmm.

17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:28

    And so in a society where we are chronically stressed, and a few years ago, the World Health Organization, as you know, called stress the health epidemic of the 21st century, it stands to reason that any activity that can help us lower stress could potentially also lower our blood pressure. Is it just music when we talk about the arts that can do that, or are there other types of engaging with the arts that can also do that?

18. DFDaisy Fancourt3:57

    It's not just music. It's other art forms as well. So we see this when people are involved with dance, with crafts, with regularly reading, with going to cultural venues. What we particularly see is if you've got these regular, the regular time you're putting aside and doing this, this is when we start to see these reductions in people's blood pressure and heart rate. And what we typically see is if you do it for sort of half an hour or an hour, you can already see short-term changes in that time span. But then if you're then doing that regularly, like every week, for example, that's when you start to see these additive benefits, like the benefits accumulating from it, and that's because you get relaxation responses from all different kinds of arts experiences.

19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:35

    Yeah. Your research has also shown a connection between the arts and mortality.

20. DFDaisy Fancourt4:42

    Mm.

21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:42

    You write about it as this, uh, I think it was a balmy summer's evening-

22. DFDaisy Fancourt4:46

    [laughs]

23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:46

    ... that you were crunching some numbers and something quite surprising came up, didn't it?

24. DFDaisy Fancourt4:51

    Yes. I'm an epidemiologist by training, so I look a lot at very large cohort studies that track thousands, tens of thousands of people over years and decades of their lives, and it's a perfect opportunity to see how our day-to-day behaviors link in with these long-term outcomes, including the length of our lives. And it's not just my study now. There have been over a dozen that have shown-

25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:11

    Mm

26. DFDaisy Fancourt5:11

    ... that people who are regularly engaged in arts and culture have longer lifespans. And I think initially we thought, well, is this actually anything to do with arts and culture, or is it just that people are wealthier or they're, they've got other lifestyle behaviors-

27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:23

    Mm

28. DFDaisy Fancourt5:23

    ... that, that are healthier? But actually now we've used so many different methods, testing all of these other explanations, and yes, they explain a bit of the association, but we still see this very strong and clear link that the more regularly people are engaged in the arts, independent of those factors, the longer their lifespan.

29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:40

    Yeah. I think you quote in the book that there is a 31% lower risk of dying for people who are engaged in the arts compared to those who are not.

30. DFDaisy Fancourt5:51

    Yeah. It's a complex statistic, this, because obviously it's, it's to do with what your own risk of dying is year on year.

Episode duration: 1:23:54