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Alzheimer's & Dementia

Dementia linked to more years lost in Danes with more education

Compared with the general population, dementia was linked to 5.01 years lost in men with longer education and 5.29 in women, versus 3.99 for both with shorter education.

Paper by Janet Janbek, Thomas Munk Laursen, Sandra Feodor Nilsson, +4 more authorsGunhild Waldemar · Danish Dementia Research Centre
Figure 1 from Alzheimer's & Dementia
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Figure 1. Janbek et al., CC BY

Our read

Populations
Studied:
Cohort study in people
In the record:
The 121st paper on educational attainment with results in people; 206 on record in all.
Why it’s aging research:
It measures how long life or healthy life lasts.

Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News

Paper
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Adults born and living in Denmark, aged 65 to 100, were included in an observational cohort study of 1,991,379 people covering 2000–2022. Women made up 52%. The researchers grouped participants by education completed by age 65 and identified dementia through hospital diagnoses or prescriptions for dementia medicines.

Death rates were higher in people with dementia than in those without it. This relative difference was greatest among people with longer education and those born more recently. Compared with the general population in the same education group, people with dementia had shorter life expectancy, with the largest gap among those with longer education. Higher education was nevertheless associated with longer life expectancy in both sexes.

Why it matters

For dementia in older age, the authors highlighted education as a target for delaying onset and increasing years lived without the condition.

Caveats

The death-rate analysis accounted for age and calendar year, but other health differences may have contributed to the education patterns. The cohort excluded people born outside Denmark, those with dementia already recorded at entry and those missing education records.

Where the evidence stands

Educational attainment

Humans: replicated by independent labs. Cells, worms or flies and mice: nothing yet.

C, W, M, H: cells, worms or flies, mice, humans. Dark: independent labs found the same change there. Light: one lab or one study. Outline: nothing yet.

Labs are independent when their papers share no last author and no institution.

Against: findings that point the other way from most findings on the same outcome.

Company ties: findings with an author at a company, or from a paper whose competing-interests statement declares ties to one.

  • 99 independent labs in 35 countries
  • 10 findings against
  • Funders: National Institutes of Health and others
  • 11 of 163 findings with company ties

From the paper

Participants

The analytic cohort comprised 364,673 individuals with long-term, 816,280 with intermediate-term, and 810,426 with short-term education (Table 1).

3 RESULTS

Quoted word for word from the full text on alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com.

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