Practice News Story

The following is a writing exercise for my Newsgathering class.

Right-handed women are most likely to live into old age, a study recently released in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates.

After reviewing 987 death certificates from Southern California counties, Diane Halpern, a psychology professor at California State University at San Bernardino, and Stanley Coren, a researcher from the University of British Columbia, have released a study declaring a life expectancy for left-handed individuals 11 years shorter than that for right-handed individuals.

With an average age at death of 78, right-handed women outstrip right-handed men by five years, left-handed women by six years, and left-handed men by 16 years. The average age difference between right- and left-handers is nine years.

According to the study, the 10 percent of the U.S. population that is left-handed is six times more likely than right-handed people to die of accidents of all kinds. They are four times more likely to die from injuries while driving. “Almost all engineering is geared to the right hand and right foot,” Halpern said. “There are many more car and other accidents among left-handers because of their environment.”

Halpern said researchers had been aware for years that old right-handers out-numbered old left-handers, but believed that was because of the early 20th-century practice of re-training left-handed children to use their right hand as the dominant hand. “We thought we were looking at old people who used to be left-handed, but we weren’t,” she said. “The truth was, there simply weren’t many left-handers left alive, compared to right-handers.”

But study results should be “interpreted cautiously,” Halpern said. She also warned against using the study results to predict the life span of a single individual because the study does not assess individual fitness.

“It’s important that mothers of left-handed children not be alarmed and not try to change which hand the child uses,” Halpern said. “There are many, many old left-handed people.”


Add a graphic (bar chart) for the following data.

Right-handed people average life expectancy: 75
Left-handed people average life expectancy: 66
Right-handed women average life expectancy: 78
Left-handed women average life expectancy: 72
Right-handed men average life expectancy: 73
Left-handed men average life expectancy: 62