Greater educational achievement is well established to correlate with greater life expectancy. It is one of a web of correlations linking longevity, intelligence, education, wealth, and socioeconomic status. Untangling the causes of these correlations remains a work in progress, and this will likely continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. Here, researchers use an aging clock based on clinical parameters to produce biological age estimates from past epidemiological study data to show how the correlation between education and biological age has changed over time. They find that educational achievement correlated with a greater slowing of biological age ten years ago than was the case thirty years ago.
It is interesting to speculate as to why this might be the case. We might start with the hypothesis that more approaches to intervention in aging, and more knowledge of those approaches, have become available over time. Equally, this could simply be a consequence of a general improvement in medicine and approaches to health, that have the side-effect of modest gains in life expectancy. Then consider that people with a greater degree of educational achievement tend to be better placed to make use of those improvements.
Educational inequality in health has been increasing in the United States. The growth in health inequality has not been limited to specific conditions but has been observed across a wide range of outcomes, including disability, multimorbidity, self-rated health, and mortality. This study used data for adults aged 50-79 from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to assess changes in biological aging across education groups over a 25-year period.
We found that while biological aging slowed for each education group, educational inequality increased owing to greater improvements among those with the highest education levels. Specifically, biological age differences between adults with 0-11 years of schooling and adults with 16+ years of schooling grew from one year in 1988-1994 to almost two years in 2015-2018. Growing inequality in biological aging was not attenuated by changes in smoking, obesity, or medication use. Overall, these results point to an increasing difference in physiological dysregulation by education among U.S. older adults, which might remain a source of greater and growing inequality in morbidity, disability, and mortality in the near future.
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