If you thought education can only help you get a good job, think again? As per the study, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, students who study more have a lesser probability of heart diseases in adulthood. That’s because these people are likely to have higher incomes, hence can afford better food and health care.
These are the observations of an experiment conducted by the researchers at UC San Francisco and Stanford University in the US by evaluating state compulsory schooling laws, which legislate the number of years children are required to attend school. From the national surveys conducted from 1971 to 2012, the researchers identified nearly 75,000 people born between 1900 and 1950 when law required children to attend school between 0 and 12 years. They then used US Census data on a group of similar individuals to predict the number of years of their schooling, based on their year and state of birth. The study found that a third of the study participants had not graduated from high school. While 34.5% of the participants reported heart disease, there was a 2.5% reduction in occurrence of the disease with each year of additional compulsory schooling through high school. Also, there were improvements in several cardiovascular risk factors with each additional year of study, including reductions of more than 3% in smoking and about 5% in depression.
“Overall, people with more education may have reduced heart disease because they have higher incomes, allowing them to afford better food and health care. Or, it may be that they have more resources and therefore less stress, which has been previously linked with heart disease,” said Rita Hamad, the lead author of the study.
Source: India Today
Do you feel strongly about something? Have a story to share? Write to us at info@thepeepertimes.com or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.