Staying on at school until 18 ‘slows down ageing process’

SCIENCE EDITOR

STAYING at school until the age of 18 slows down ageing compared to people who left at 16, scientists have found.

It is well known that education helps people live longer and protects against disease, but the research is the first to show one of the reasons is because it actually slows down the ageing process at a cellular level.

Columbia University in New York found that two additional years of schooling translated to a two to three per cent slower pace of ageing.

Daniel Belsky, of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, said: “We’ve known for a long time that people who have higher levels of education tend to live longer lives.

“But there are a bunch of challenges in figuring out how that happens and, critically, whether interventions to promote educational attainment will contribute to healthy longevity.”

For the research the team analysed data from 14,106 people enrolled in

Framingham Heart Study, an ongoing study first initiated in 1948 that spans three generations.

People participating in the study were asked to undergo blood and genetic tests to find out how their cells and DNA are ageing.

The turnover of cells, and the function of mitochondrial DNA – the cell’s battery – grow sluggish over time, and this slowing down can be used like a clock to measure how well someone is ageing. While disease or poor lifestyle can make the clock speed up, healthy lifestyles have been shown to slow it down. Now education has also been found to have an impact on cells.

The researchers also found that 3.6 years of additional education was associated with a one third lower risk of coronary heart disease.

It is known that better educated people were also less likely to smoke, have lower body mass index and have a more favourable blood fat profile.

The research was published in the journal