The passage of time has an inevitable impact on our physical appearance and our health, but healthy lifestyle habits such as exercising regularly, eating a balanced diet, sleeping well and interacting socially can help us greatly to delay the signs of aging. and to live longer and better. Now, new research has revealed why more educated people experience slower aging and enjoy greater longevity.
The study was conducted by researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health and the Robert N. Butler Aging Center at Columbia University in which data from people who participated in the Framingham Heart Study – a study ongoing observational study that began in 1948 and currently spans three generations – and have found that upward educational mobility was significantly linked to a decrease in the rate of aging and a lower risk of death.
This Columbia analysis is a pioneer in establishing a connection between educational mobility and the speed of biological aging and mortality and its findings have been published in the journal JAMA Network Open. “We have known for some time that people with higher levels of education tend to live longer. However, there are numerous challenges in understanding how this occurs and, critically, whether interventions to promote educational attainment will contribute to healthy longevity.” Said Daniel Belsky, associate professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School and Center on Aging, and lead author of the study.
A slower rate of aging and lower risk of mortality
Biological aging refers to the accumulation of molecular changes that progressively compromise the integrity and resilience of our cells, tissues and organs as we age. To measure the pace of aging, the researchers used an algorithm known as the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock on genomic data collected by the Framingham Heart Study.
The latest findings indicated that, according to the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock, two additional years of schooling translates into a two to three percent slower rate of aging. This slowing in the rate of aging corresponds to an approximate 10% reduction in the risk of mortality in the Framingham Heart Study, consistent with Belsky’s previous research on the association of DunedinPACE with the risk of death.
DunedinPACE, developed by Columbia researchers and colleagues, is based on the analysis of chemical marks on the DNA contained in white blood cells, or DNA methylation marks. Named after the Dunedin Study birth cohort used to develop it, DunedinPACE (Pace of Epigenome-Calculated Aging) is measured from a blood test and functions as a speedometer for the aging process, measuring how quickly or slowly a person’s body is changing as they age.
The Columbia researchers used data from 14,106 participants in the Framingham Heart Study, spanning three generations, to link children’s educational attainment data with that of their parents. They then used data from a subset of participants who provided blood samples during data collection to calculate the rate of biological aging using the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock.
“Our findings support the hypothesis that interventions to promote educational attainment will slow the rate of biological aging and promote longevity.”
In the primary analysis, they examined associations between educational mobility, aging, and mortality in a subset of 3,101 participants for whom measures of educational mobility and pace of aging could be calculated. For 2,437 participants with at least one sibling, they also investigated whether differences in educational attainment between siblings were associated with a difference in the pace of aging.
Gloria Graf, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Epidemiology supervised by Belsky and first author of the study, explained: “A key challenge in studies like this is that people with different levels of education often come from families with different educational backgrounds and levels of education. Another resources. To address these factors, we focus on educational mobility, how much more (or less) education a person completed compared to their parents, and educational differences between siblings: how much more (or less) education a person completed compared to their siblings. . These study designs control for differences between families and allow us to isolate the effects of education.”
By combining these study designs with the new DunedinPACE epigenetic clock, researchers were able to examine how education affects the pace of aging. Then, by linking the education and pace of aging data with longitudinal records of how long the participants lived, the team was able to determine whether a slower pace of aging explained the greater longevity in people with more education.
Graf noted, “Our findings support the hypothesis that interventions to promote educational attainment will slow the rate of biological aging and promote longevity.” Belsky added: “Ultimately, experimental evidence is needed to confirm our findings. “Epigenetic clocks like DunedinPACE have the potential to improve such experimental studies by providing an outcome that may reflect the impacts of education on healthy aging long before the onset of diseases and disabilities in later life.”
“We found that upward educational mobility was associated with both a slower rate of aging and a lower risk of death,” Graf highlighted. “In fact, up to half of the educational gradient in mortality we observed was explained by healthier aging trajectories among better-educated participants.” This pattern of association was similar across generations and held true in comparisons between siblings within the same family: siblings with greater educational mobility tended to age more slowly compared to their less educated siblings, the authors conclude.
