Want to live longer? Study hard!
By ANIMonday, February 28, 2011
WASHINGTON - If you want to live longer, pay attention at school, study hard, and go to college, according to a new study.
Researchers at Brown University’s Department of Community Health has found a correlation between the years spent in education and lower lifetime blood pressure along with a decrease in other factors, which influence health such as alcohol, smoking and weight gain.
They also found that the benefit appears to be greater for women than for men.
Taking their data from The Framingham Offspring Study, Eric Loucks and his team tracked 3890 people for 30 years and monitored their medical history, how long they stayed in education, and their levels of coronary heart disease.
They found that educated men (greater than 17 years of education) had a lower BMI, smoked less and drank less than men with less education.
Educated women also smoked less, had lower BMI, but drank more than their less educated sisters.
However, they still only drank about half as much as the educated men.
For both men and women, each extra level of academic study completed further reduced the incidence of high blood pressure.
“Even when adjusted for socio-economic variables, education is inversely correlated with high blood pressure and this positive effect of education on health is even stronger for women than men,” said Loucks.
The study is published in the journal BMC Public Health. (ANI)
