How your level of education affects your longevity

For the first time in decades, life expectancy has been in decline in the United States.

To explore the effect on lifespan that race and education have, two variables most often linked to life expectancy, researchers from the Yale School of Medicine and the University of Alabama-Birmingham looked at data of 5,114 people in four US cities.

The data was based on people recruited for a longevity study approximately 30 years ago when they were in their early 20s. Now in their mid-50s, researchers found that level of education is the best predictor of who will live the longest, not race.

Deaths under the age of 60

Of the 5,114 people in the study, 395 had died.

“These deaths are occurring in working-age people, often with children, before the age of 60,” said Yale’s Brita Roy, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology and corresponding author of the paper.

The rates of death among individuals in this group did clearly show racial differences, with approximately 9% of blacks dying at an early age compared to 6% of whites.

As for causes of death by race, black men were significantly more likely to die by homicide and white men from Aids. The most common causes of death across all groups over time were cardiovascular disease and cancer.

More than a high school education

There were notable differences in rates of death by education level.

Approximately 13% of participants with a high school degree or less education died compared with only approximately 5% of college graduates.

Strikingly, note the researchers, when looking at race and education at the same time, differences related to race all but disappeared: 13,5% of black subjects and 13,2% of white subjects with a high school degree or less died during the course of the study.

By contrast, 5,9% of black subjects and 4,3% of whites with college degrees had died.

Source: Yale University via www.sciencedaily.com

This post appeared first on All4Women

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