Lower education, faster ageing

This latest study will hopefully give children a reason not to ‘moan and groan’ in the morning as they drag themselves out of bed to get ready for the school day ahead.

According to researchers in Britain and America, people who leave education with fewer qualifications are prone to age more quickly.

The study, published in the journal Brain, Behaviour and Immunity this month, looked at the length of sections of DNA known as telomeres.

About 450 people took part in the long-term health study, which found people who did not achieve good grades at school had shorter telomeres, suggesting they may age faster.

Telomeres are sections of DNA which cap the ends of chromosomes, protecting them from damage and the loss of cell functions associated with ageing.

Britain Medical Research Council’s, Stephen Holgate, said the key finding to come from the study was that a person’s experiences earlier in life can have important influences on their health.

According to Mr Holgate, an implication of the study was the difficulty to establish the cause of the findings, but he said the study provided evidence that “being educated to a higher level can benefit you more than in the job market alone”.

The participants in the study were civil servants taking part in the large, ongoing research study looking at various aspects of health in more than 10,000 UK civil servants.

A subset of 506 healthy male and female participants, aged 53 to 76 years old, provided information on their educational history and gave blood samples.

The blood samples were used to obtain a particular type of white blood cell that could then be tested for two characteristics relating to the telomeres.

The researchers divided the participants into four education groups: those who had no qualifications at all, those who left formal education after exams at 16 years of age, those who left after exams at 18 years, and those who obtained a degree from a university or other higher education institution.

The results revealed people with lower educational achievements had shorter telomeres, indicating that they may age faster, and the study also offered strong evidence that this was not affected by people’s social and economic status later in life, as was previously thought.

“We already know from previous research that people with poor backgrounds are prone to age more quickly,” said University College London’s researcher, Andrew Steptoe.

“Education is a marker of social class that people acquire early in life, and our research suggested that it was long term exposure to the conditions of lower status that promotes accelerated cellular ageing,” he said.