Japanese scientists have questioned the relationship between educational attainment and dementia risk. It was previously believed that people with higher education were less prone to cognitive decline in old age. The findings of the study are published in the journal of the Association for Psychological Sciences (APS) – Psychological Science.
The authors studied data from about 2,000 adults aged 40 to 79 years. Participants were followed for 25 years. They were tested several times on indicators of intelligence (the ability to accumulate knowledge, facts and skills, the ability to reason and think flexibly). The experts concluded that education had no significant effect on cognitive decline in any of the tests.
At the same time, the results obtained seem contradictory, since previous work has illustrated that more educated people are less likely to develop a neurodegenerative disease. The researchers believe that there may be two explanations.
First, education does not directly affect cognitive decline, but is associated with higher initial cognitive skills that were formed before the onset of age-related degradation. For example, people with higher advanced degrees have been shown to perform somewhat better on cognitive tasks at the start of trials. However, with age, mental functions decline in everyone. If a person has higher cognitive abilities, then cognitive decline occurs later, and it also takes him longer to reach the thresholds for dementia.
Secondly, dementia is associated with factors such as obesity, air pollution and head injuries, that is, brain damage. Moreover, all these parameters also have a correlation with education. For example, people with a higher level of education are richer on average and therefore can usually afford to live in less polluted areas. This suggests that education can only indirectly contribute to the prevention of dementia.