Not Going To School As Bad For Your Health As Smoking, Study Finds

Not going to school is as bad for your health as smoking ten cigarettes a day for ten years, according to a landmark global study.

And spending 18 years in education has the same health benefits as eating the ideal quantities of vegetables, researchers found.

The link between time spent in education and living longer has been known for some time, but the latest study — the largest of its kind — is the first to quantify the impact.

Every year of education cuts the risk of death by two per cent regardless of age, sex, location and background, according to the findings of Norwegian researchers, published in the Lancet Public Health.

And they found no significant difference between countries at different stages of development, meaning an extra year of education for those in rich countries makes just as much difference as for those in poor countries.

“Education is important in its own right, not just for its benefits on health, but now being able to quantify the magnitude of this benefit is a significant development,” said Dr Terje Andreas Eikemo, head of the Centre for Global Health Inequalities Research (CHAIN) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and co-author of the study.

The findings mean that those who complete six years of primary education reduce their risk of death by 13%, while graduating from secondary school cuts it by 25%.

Spending 18 years in education — roughly equivalent to completing a masters degree — reduces the risk of death by 34%.

“More education leads to better employment and higher income, better access to healthcare, and helps us take care of our own health,” said Mirza Balaj, of NTNU’s Department of Sociology and Political Science and co-lead author of the study.

“Highly educated people also tend to develop a larger set of social and psychological resources that contribute to their health and the length of their lives.”

While the benefits are greater for young people, education still conferred better health on those aged over 50 and even those over 70.

At the other end of the scale, researchers compared not going to school with the effect of other risk factors.

They found not going to school at all was the equivalent of ten years’ worth of smoking ten cigarettes a day or drinking five alcoholic drinks a day.

“We need to increase social investments to enable access to better and more education around the globe to stop the persistent inequalities that are costing lives,” Balaj added.

Researchers analyzed more than 10,000 data points, drawn from more than 600 published studies from 59 countries, for the study, funded by the Research Council of Norway and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Closing the education gap means closing the mortality gap, and we need to interrupt the cycle of poverty and preventable deaths with the help of international commitment,” said Claire Henson, co-lead author and researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine and co-lead author of the study.

“In order to reduce inequalities in mortality, it’s important to invest in areas that promote people’s opportunities to get an education. This can have a positive effect on population health in all countries.”