Education or death – Kommersant

The positive relationship between education and life expectancy has long been known to scientists. Now researchers have decided to study exactly how much education reduces the risk of early death. It turned out that every additional year of education, whether at school or university, reduces this risk by 2%.

This week in the medical journal The Lancet A study was published showing that life expectancy is increased not only by a healthy lifestyle or reducing stress levels, but also by education. The study was prepared by an international team of scientists. They worked as part of a project by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine and the Center for Research on Global Health Inequalities (CHAIN) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The authors used meta-analysis methods, analyzing about 600 other studies on this topic, and drew conclusions based on them. Thus, this is the most comprehensive study on the relationship between educational level and life expectancy to date. These studies contained data from 59 countries, including the US, Germany, UK, China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa.

“The positive relationship between increased years of education and improved health is well known. The main ways in which education is thought to improve health include social, psychosocial, economic and cognitive benefits,” the study authors note.

Next, the scientists decided to study how these benefits are expressed quantitatively. According to their calculations, each additional year of education reduces the risk of early death by an average of 2%. Moreover, there was not much difference between rich and poor countries, different social groups, genders, and so on.

Thus, the likelihood of early death among people who graduated from school and higher education, that is, studied for approximately 18 years, is 34% lower than for those who did not study at all. Therefore, the authors note, education reduces the risk of early death in much the same way as eating the doctor-recommended amount of vegetables daily.

To put it another way, lack of education has the same negative impact on life expectancy as smoking ten or more cigarettes a day or drinking five or more alcoholic drinks a day.

“The impact of education appears to be comparable to some more serious health factors, such as diet, smoking or excessive drinking,” said IHME professor Dr Emmanuela Gakidou, one of the study’s authors. She also noted that an unexpected finding of this study was that the effect of education did not decrease with increasing number of years of education. That is, for example, the tenth year of study affects life expectancy in about the same way as the first or second.

“The exact mechanism of how education relates to mortality is complex. It affects where you work, your income, the area in which you live, and what resources you have to eat healthy and maintain a healthy lifestyle. You can imagine it affecting every aspect of your life and affecting the rest of your life,” says Dr. Gakidu. According to the researchers, this means that investing in education may be one way to improve population health.

“The key is that education leads to higher lifetime earnings, which in turn helps you access a lot of very important things like better housing, better food,” says the deputy director of the Health Foundation. David Finch—It allows you to build better social connections. Improves your access to and understanding of information, which helps you make choices, whether it’s related to finances, what you’ll do, or what you’ll be involved in.”

Neil Davies, professor of medical statistics at University College London, said that while the study was “impressive”, there were some limitations to its findings.

Related, for example, to the fact that in the context of widespread higher education and a general decline in smoking, the importance of various factors may change, and the indicators of people who have studied for less time may become closer to those who have been educated for many years.

David Finch also believes that in the future these relationships may not be so obvious. This is, among other things, due to the fact that it is more difficult for young people to buy housing than their parents’ generation. “Will the career earnings trajectory of young people be the same as it was for people their age 30 or 40 years ago? The prospects are not so bleak,” said Mr. Finch.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya