Scientists have long noticed a connection between the level of education and life expectancy of people. A new study has found that additional years of schooling correlates not only with a reduced risk of death, but also with slower biological aging.
Previously, according to the results of a meta-analysis of over 600 scientific papers, it was found that education prolongs a person’s life, regardless of age, gender, place of residence and socio-demographic conditions. However, the mechanism of this connection is not yet fully understood.
Researchers from the Joseph Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and several other medical and research centers in the United States, Norway and the United Kingdom tried to understand whether encouraging people to become more educated could promote healthy longevity.
In a new work published in JAMA Network Open, scientists used data from the Framingham Heart Study. This long-term study among residents of Framingham, Massachusetts (USA) has been going on since 1948 and has already covered three generations of participants.
From previous work, the authors knew about the influence of genetic and social heredity on a person's educational level and the possible impact of these factors on the rate of aging. Therefore, in their analysis, the scientists decided to trace the connections between intergenerational educational mobility, biological aging and mortality.
In total, doctors examined 3,101 participants in the Framingham study. The level of educational mobility, that is, the difference in education between parents and children, was determined by researchers by comparing data from representatives of different generations. In addition, the DunedinPACE algorithm was applied to participants' genomic data obtained from their blood tests to calculate the rate of biological aging. The researchers also studied mortality and life expectancy statistics.
Having combined and carefully analyzed this information, scientists came to the conclusion that education can slow down aging. Thus, every two additional years of study compared to parents slowed down the rate of biological aging among participants in the Framingham study by two to three percent. This, in turn, provided a reduction in the risk of death by about 10 percent.
The association between greater education and healthier aging trajectories was similar across generations and persisted when children from the same family were compared. In other words, siblings with higher levels of educational mobility tended to age more slowly and be healthier than their less educated siblings.
“The findings support the hypothesis that measures to improve education will slow the rate of biological aging and promote longevity. But still, experimental data are needed to confirm these conclusions,” concluded one of the authors of the study, Gloria Graf.