Staying in education linked to lower risk of heart disease

ucl.ac.uk/news" target="_blank">UCL News has led with a story about the relationship between increased education years and the risk of coronary heart disease. The article concentrates on a study co-authored by the Research Department of Epidemiology and Public Health's Dr Taavi Tillmann.

An excerpt of the article is available below: 

Staying in education is associated with a lower risk of developing heart disease, finds a study published by The BMJ today.

Credit: Book Shadow by Fabrizio Russo (via Flickr)

The findings provide the strongest evidence to date that increasing the number of years that people spend in the education system may lower their risk of developing coronary heart disease by a substantial amount, say the authors.

To date, it has been unclear if spending more time in education has any impact on heart disease--in other words, whether increasing education might prevent it.

To better understand the nature of this association, and help inform public policy, a team of international researchers from UCL, the University of Lausanne, and the University of Oxford set out to test whether education is a risk factor for the development of coronary heart disease.

They analysed 162 genetic variants already shown to be linked with years of schooling from 543,733 men and women, predominantly of European origin, using a technique called mendelian randomisation.

Using genetic information in this way avoids some of the problems that afflict observational studies, making the results less prone to confounding from other factors, and therefore more likely to be reliable in understanding cause and effect.

The authors found that genetic predisposition towards more time spent in education was associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease.

More specifically, 3.6 years of additional education, which is similar to an undergraduate university degree, would be predicted to translate into about a one third reduction in the risk of coronary heart disease.

Dr Taavi Tillmann added: "We were really excited by this discovery - education could be just as important in causing heart disease, as things like blood pressure and cholesterol. For over fifty years, doctors and public health experts have made huge progress in getting people to maintain healthy blood pressure and cholesterol. This has prevented millions of heart attacks. Our study opens up a completely new angle in the fight against eradicating heart disease: that we should think about also helping people stay in education for longer."

Read the full UCL News article

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