Poorer schools may heighten dementia rates decades later
A new study suggests that race and early education affect dementia risk in seniors. Researchers spent decades tracking the onset of dementia among nearly 21,000 U.S. seniors.
The team found that seniors who were educated as kids in states that generally had shorter school years, larger classes and lower attendance rates had a higher risk for dementia after age 65, compared with seniors raised in states offering a “high quality” education, meaning more school days, smaller classes and better attendance.
They also found that Black seniors are more likely to have been raised in a “low quality” educational environment than their white peers, putting them at higher risk of dementia.
“Worse educational quality is associated with higher risk of dementia, but if Black individuals are more exposed to worse educational quality, (then) there’s a larger population burden of dementia among Black individuals,” said lead author Yenee Soh, a postdoctoral research fellow at Kaiser Permanente Northern California in Oakland.
That added burden among Black people, Soh said, likely sources back
“to unequal investments in high quality education due to systemic racism.”
To examine links among childhood education, race and dementia, researchers studied patients who had completed an optional health survey at some point between 1964 and 1972, were at least 65 years old and were dementia-free in 1996. Participants were born from 1902 to 1931, and roughly 1 in 5 patients was Black; the rest were white.
After reviewing records of new dementia diagnoses between 1997 and 2019, the team found that those seniors who grew up in the lowest quality educational environment were significantly more likely to end up with dementia, compared to those from states with the best schooling.
Soh stressed that the findings only highlight an “association” between education, race and dementia risk, and are not clear proof of cause and effect.
As to why inferior education might boost dementia risk, she pointed to several potential factors, including the possibility that kids with such backgrounds have less access to health care overall, as well as a higher risk for obesity, smoking and high blood pressure.
The findings were recently published in JAMA Neurology.