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Study Shows Right-handed People Live Longer

The hand you write with might determine how long you are going to live.

A study released in today's New England Journal of Medicine suggests that right-handed people are more likely to outlive their left-handed counterparts.

Diane Halpern, psychology professor at California State University at San Bernadino, studied the death certificates and dominant hands of 987 residents of Southern California. She and her colleagues determined that left-handed people were six times more likely to die from accidents than right-handed people.

"The results are striking in their magnitude," Halpern said. She found that right-handed women outlive left-handed women by six years. Right-handed males tend to outlive left-handed males by 11 years.

Halpern offers a practical reason for the frequency of accidental deaths among left-handed people. "Almost all engingeering is geared to the right hand and left foot," Halpern said. She adds that, "there are many, many old left-handed people" and that her study "should not, of course, be used to predict the life span of any individual."