Longevity Briefs: Want To Stay Young? Stay In School

Longevity briefs provides a short summary of novel research in biology, medicine, or biotechnology that caught the attention of our researchers in Oxford, due to its potential to improve our health, wellbeing, and longevity.

The problem: It’s well known that people who are better educated are healthier and live longer on average. This is something that scientists often need to control for when studying how lifestyle factors affect ageing, since poor education and unhealthy lifestyles tend to go hand in hand. However, the association between poor education and ageing is a topic that deserves study by itself. Does lack of education actually cause people to age faster, or does lack of education simply correlate with factors like poverty and air pollution that make it harder for people to live a healthy lifestyle? The relationship is complex, hard to untangle, and probably works both ways.

The discovery: In this study, researchers measured the rate of ageing of 3,101 participants of the Framingham Heart Study using the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock. Put simply, DunedinPACE is an algorithm that uses genomic data (specifically the molecular tags called methyl groups that are added and removed from the DNA molecule throughout life) in order to estimate how quickly someone is ageing. 

They then analysed how educational attainment related to rate of ageing. Rather than simply comparing participants of different educational attainment, they focussed on educational mobility. In order to tease out the effects of education from those of a better start in life, they studied whether people who achieved higher levels of education than their parents or their siblings also aged more slowly, and found that they did. Two years of additional education translated to a 2-3% slower pace of ageing on average. This reduced pace of ageing was responsible for an estimated 7% reduction in mortality, which is about half of the observed reduction in mortality that came from longer time spent in education.

The implications: The study supports the idea that the link between educational attainment and slower ageing isn’t just because people of higher socioeconomic status also stay in school for longer. Of course, it’s not hard to imagine how life choices that lead to dropping out of school could also lead to faster ageing and negative health outcomes later on. However, other studies looking at interventions aimed at keeping people in education for longer, as well as policy changes that raise the minimum number of years of schooling, do generally support the idea that more years of education leads to better health outcomes. So while the present study could have overestimated the benefits of education somewhat, they’re unlikely to be entirely due to confounding factors. 

Why might better education lead to slower ageing? The obvious explanations would be things like upward social mobility and being more health-aware. However, it’s also quite plausible that the process of learning (and continued learning after institutional education has ended) may have some intrinsic benefits, particularly when it comes to making the brain more resistant to ageing. Studies show that adults who continue to learn new things throughout life get less cognitive decline, but it’s hard to prove convincingly that this relationship is causative.