You Can Slow Down Your Biological Clock By Staying In School, Study Finds

Staying in education can slow down your biological clock and reduce the signs of aging, according to a new study.

An extra two years of education translates to a two to three per cent slower pace of aging and a 10% lower risk of death, researchers found.

The link between education and health has been known for some time: a study published earlier this year found that every year spent in education reduces the risk of death, and that not going to school is as bad for your health as smoking.

But the latest report, by researchers at Colombia University, is the first to connect educational mobility with the pace of biological aging.

“We found that upward educational mobility was associated both with a slower pace of aging and decreased risk of death,” said Gloria Graf, a PhD candidate in Columbia’s Department of Epidemiology and co-author of the study.

“Our findings support the hypothesis that interventions to promote educational attainment will slow the pace of biological aging and promote longevity.”

Researchers applied DunedinPACE — an algorithm designed to measure how bodies age — to data on more than 3,000 people collected through a long-running heart study.

DundeinPACE — developed from the Dunedin Study birth cohort, with PACE standing for Pace of Aging Computed from the Epigenome — is an epigenetic clock that analyzes chemical tags on the DNA in white blood cells, and was developed by Columbia researchers, including some of those involved this study.

And they took into account the impact of coming from different backgrounds with different levels of resources by looking at how much more or less education participants in the study completed than their parents and siblings.

This controlled for the differences between families and allowed the study team to isolate the effect of education, Graf said.

After analyzing the data, they found that those who achieved higher levels of education tended to not only live longer lives but also aged more slowly.

Biological aging refers to molecular changes that progressively undermine the integrity and resilience capacity of our cells, tissues and organs as we grow older.

Linking data on education and the pace of aging with records of how long participants lived, researchers were then able to determine if a slower pace of aging accounted for differences in longevity.

“Our findings support the hypothesis that interventions to promote educational attainment will slow the pace of biological aging and promote longevity,” said Graf.

Around half the difference in mortality was explained by the slower pace of aging among better-educated participants, she added.

The pattern was similar across generations and was maintained within families: those with a higher education tended to have a slower pace of aging than their brothers and sisters, according to the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in JAMA Network Open, an open access journal of the American Medical Association.

Although the findings were consistent, experimental evidence is needed to confirm them, said Daniel Belsky, associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center and senior author of the paper.

“Epigenetic clocks like DunedinPACE have potential to enhance such experimental studies by providing an outcome that can reflect impacts of education on healthy aging well before the onset of disease and disability in later life,” Belsky added.