Why More Education Leads To Fewer Signs of Dementia In The Elderly
July 27, 2010
After more than a decade of puzzling over why people who continue their educations longer have a lower risk of developing dementia, researchers have come up with an answer.
Do the brains of the more educated resist disease better?
Nope. The answer is that people with more education cope better with changes in the brain associated with dementia, say researchers in England and Finland.
Researchers, by examining the brains of 872 people who took part in three large aging studies, had concluded previously that each additional year of education results in an 11% decrease in the risk of developing dementia.
But they had, until now, been unable to say definitively whether or not education—which is linked to higher socioeconomic status and healthier lifestyles—protects the brain against dementia.
The new study, led by Professor Carol Brayne, an epidemiologist and public health physician at the University of Cambridge, shows people with different levels of education, in fact, have similar brain pathology. That is, disease that causes dementia was as prevalent the brains of people who had extensive educations as those who did not. The difference, say the researchers, is that those with more education are better able to compensate for the effects of dementia.
Other researchers have long suspected that the ability of well-educated people to cope with damage to their brains, known as cognitive reserve, explained why, at a certain point, the better educated appeared to decline more rapidly if dementia appeared. They theorized that the disease process was probably already more advanced by the time the brains of those with more education could no longer cope.
“Previous research has shown that there is not a one-to-one relationship between being diagnosed with dementia during life and changes seen in the brain at death,” said co-author Dr Hannah Keage of the University of Cambridge. “One person may show lots of pathology in their brain while another shows very little, yet both may have had dementia. Our study shows education in early life appears to enable some people to cope with a lot of changes in their brain before showing dementia symptoms.”
This study, which uses data from the EClipSE collaboration—which combines three European population-based longitudinal studies—was able to pinpoint the relationship between education and dementia.
The study strengthens the case for investment in early education, says Brayne. “This is hugely relevant to policy decisions about the importance of resource allocation between health and education.”
The results of the study are published in the journal Brain. This post was adapted from material on Science Daily and my prior interviews with neuroscients. Further details of EClipSE are available at