How education can save your life

It is known that education decreases the incidence of cardiovascular disease. New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Public Health demonstrates that education is also correlated with lower blood pressure and a decrease in other factors which influence health such as alcohol, smoking and weight gain.

Taking their data from The Framingham Offspring Study researchers followed 3890 people, for 30 years, monitoring their medical history, how long they stayed in education, and their levels of coronary heart disease. Educated men (greater than 17 years of education) had a lower body mass index (BMI), smoked less and drank less than men with less education. Educated women also smoked less, had lower BMI, but drank more than their less educated sisters (however they still only drank about half as much as the educated men!).

For both men and women, each extra level of academic study completed further reduced the incidence of high blood pressure. Dr Eric Loucks from Brown University’s Department of Community Health said, “Even when adjusted for socio-economic variables education is inversely correlated with high blood pressure and this positive effect of education on health is even stronger for women than men.”

So your granny was right – if you want to live longer pay attention at school, study hard, and go to college.

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Dr Hilary Glover

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Notes to Editors

1. Associations of education with 30 year life course blood pressure trajectories: Framingham Offspring Study

Eric B. Loucks, Michal Abrahamowicz, Yongling Xiao, and John W. Lynch

BMC Public Health (in press)

Please name the journal in any story you write. If you are writing for the web, please link to the article. All articles are available free of charge, according to BioMed Central’s open access policy.

Article citation and URL available on request at [email protected] on the day of publication.

2. BMC Public Health is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in the epidemiology of disease and the understanding of all aspects of public health. The journal has a special focus on the social determinants of health, the environmental, behavioral, and occupational correlates of health and disease, and the impact of health policies, practices and interventions on the community.

3. BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/) is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer Science+Business Media, a leading global publisher in the STM sector.