Why right handed people live longer

Right-handers, it turned out, died at the ripe old average age of Those who preferred their left hand died at an average age of But Coren and Halpern never found out how many left and right-handers there were in those two counties of California to start with, much less how old they were. This may have nothing to do with the life expectancy of left-handed people. It is probably due to the practice, common until recent decades, of forcing left-handed people to write with their right hands in school.

Because the population of left-handers is younger, the left-handed people who die will, on average, be younger than right-handed people who die, says Hartge. Coren denies that historical practices of forcing left-handers to change could have produced his data. A subject was assigned to a handedness group only when both throwing and batting hand were the same with no indicated change in hand use. Mean age at death for the 1, right-handers was In order to test the relation between handedness and life span in a general population, we obtained death certificates from two counties in southern California.

Two thousand questionnaires concerning the handedness of the deceased family member were sent to the listed next of kin, which resulted in usable cases male subjects and female subjects. Subjects were designated as right-handers if they wrote, drew, and threw a ball with the right hand. All other subjects left-handers and mixed-handers were assigned to a non-right-handed group. Or to the discrimination they suffer when classed as cack-handed - or as "sinister", "maladroit" or "lacking dexterity?

No, as with all the best research, there is only one safe conclusion to be drawn from these findings. We need more research. Lefties die young Leader. That would be much younger than the average of age at death of right-handers. Nothing like this exaggerated scenario ever occurred in reality - but the number of people identifying as left-handed did grow dramatically during the 20th Century. So the idea that left-handers die nine years earlier than right-handers is a myth.

What about non-fatal injuries? Should we be worried about people like Claire Allen struggling in the kitchen with knives designed for the right-handed? Or my own mother for that matter, if she were forced to use right-handed scissors? You can follow the Magazine on Twitter and on Facebook. Left-handers were once mistakenly regarded as cack-handed.